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Submitted-by: jsq@tic.com (John S. Quarterman) Report on IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC meeting 16-18 October 1990 in Seattle, WA. 1 November 1990 John S. Quarterman <jsq@tic.com> Texas Internet Consulting IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC 1. What's an SEC? The IEEE Computer Society (IEEE/CS) has been delegated authority by IEEE for standards involving operating systems, and IEEE was in turn delegated authority by ANSI, which is the U.S. national standards body that holds formal representation to international standards bodies such as ISO. Committees and Sponsors Every IEEE/CS standards committee must have a sponsoring body. All of the committees that met in Seattle in October are sponsored by the IEEE/CS Technical Committee on Operating Systems, Standards Subcommittee (IEEE/CS TCOS-SS). They (IEEE 1003.x, 1201.y, 1224, 1237, and 1238) are thus sometimes refered to as the TCOS standards committees. These include the POSIX committees, but the term POSIX properly applies only to the IEEE 1003.x committees, and to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG15 committee that deals with the same topics and drafts in their 9945 documents, but not to the other TCOS committees. If I've counted right, TCOS now sponsors 30 projects in 20 standards committees. SEC Composition Yes, but what's an SEC? The Sponsor Executive Committee of IEEE/CS TCOS-SS, whose purpose is to oversee standards projects sponsored by TCOS. The SEC is composed of the chairs of all the TCOS commitees, plus officers, e.g., Jim Isaak, Chair, Shane McCarron, Secretary, and various Vice-Chairs for specific subjects, many of whom are chairs of subcommittees: __________ * UNIXTM is a Registered Trademark of UNIX System Laboratories in the United States and other countries. 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 2 - Vice-Chair Area __________________________________ Hal Jespersen Technical Editing Ralph Barker Coordination Robert Bismuth Interpretations Dave Dodge Logistics Lorraine Kevra Balloting There are also steering committees for certain areas: ____________________________________ Roger Martin Conformance Testing Tim Baker Distribution Services All the Institutional Representatives (IRs) to TCOS are also SEC members. The IRs at the time of the October SEC meeting were: IR Organization _______________________________________________ Ralph Barker UniForum John S. Quarterman USENIX Martin Kirk X/Open Fritz Shultz Open Software Foundation Shane McCarron UNIX International ? SHARE (the IBM user group) ? Free Software Foundation ? ? (the Navy users group) The last two were approved at the October meeting. There are two functions of an IR, which can be split: participating in SEC meetings and activities; and participating in ballotting groups, where the IRs ballot for their institutions, unlike all other ballotters, who vote as individuals. SEC Functions The SEC decides its own membership, either by electing officers, or by accepting new IRs, or by approving Project Authorization Requests (PARs) for new commitees. Chairs of standards committees are appointed by TCOS-SS (i.e., normally by the TCOS-SS Chair, who is also the SEC Chair) and approved by their working groups. In practice such a chair is normally named in the PAR that the SEC accepts to establish the committee. The SEC can also abolish committees (see below), and it can establish rules for its own activities, such as for acceptance of PARs (see below). 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 3 - 2. Language Independence IEEE Std. 1003.1-1988, the original POSIX standard, is written in terms of the C Programming Language. It makes some attempt to address the issue of multiple programming languages by distinguishing between Common Usage C and Standard C, and by definitions of conformance and compliance that are not tied to a specific language (you can have a POSIX system that doesn't have any language translator at all). Nonetheless, all the interfaces of 1003.1 are defined in terms of C. WG15 and LI WG15 has made it clear all along that language-specific standards are not acceptable to the ISO process. The POSIX committees have accepted that judgment in principle, but not a single POSIX committee has produced a language independent (LI) document. This is a problem not only for those committees such as 1003.2 and 1003.4 that are working on base documents, but also for those that are working on language bindings, such as the 1003.5 Ada committee and the 1003.9 Fortran committees. Should the language binding committees attempt to produce ``thin'' documents that just refer to a language independent base document, or should they produce ``thick'' documents that specify the language-independent interface as well as the language binding? It's hard to make thin language documents without existing language- independent base documents. This is a good reason for LI, independent of what WG15 wants. In fairness, it must be pointed out that at least 1003.4 and 1003.1 are already doing substantial work on language independence. The LI issue came to a head at the June 1990 Paris WG15 meeting, which was the most recent one before the Seattle TCOS committee meetings. As related in Dominic Dunlop's ISO Monitor report, WG15 refused to accept the IEEE 1003.4 document (and several others) for consideration as an International Standard because it was not language independent. Since 1003.4, in particular, is already balloting, this left the SEC between a rock (WG15) and a hard place (getting its own committees to implement LI). See also Paul Rabin's October posting on this subject. LI Resolutions An SEC subcommittee to examine the LI issue reported back a motion to require all TCOS committees to incorporate an LI part before ballot approval. (There were actually several overlapping and sequential motions, each of which was savagely amended by the SEC, but let's keep such gore out of this report.) The LI notion was not happily received by some of the SEC members, particularly not by 1003.2. Various people queried whether such a requirement could be established without a separate PAR for each affected committee, in order to confirm an LI document for each one. It was pointed out that the resolution specified an LI part, not a separate document, and thus no 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 4 - new PARs would be needed. It was questioned whether such a requirement could be imposed on a standard already in balloting, since changes to such documents can only be made in response to the balloting process. The SEC Chair pointed out that balloting changes could be made not only in response to objections, but also to balloting comments, and the resolution would appear as a comment. (I don't believe anyone mentioned it specifically, but a document approved by its balloting group still has to be approved by the IEEE/CS Standards Activities Board, which is unlikely to approve anything not recommended by the IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC.) It was pointed out that whenever new conditions had been imposed on a standard in balloting (such as for test assertions), balloting had been delayed up to a year. Several chairs made it clear that their committees didn't want to do this work, or at least didn't want it imposed on them by the SEC in this manner, especially considering that the gist of the new proposal had already been accepted by the SEC as a guideline in a previous meeting. An amendment was moved and seconded to make the LI rules applicable only to those standards that start balloting after 18 October 1990 (the date of the meeting in process), thus excluding 1003.2 and 1003.4. This even though 1003.4 has apparently already done much of the LI work, and 1003.2 is apparently working on it. The amendment was passed, and the base motion was passed as amended. But what about WG15? There was, nonetheless, some confidence that WG15 might alter its stand on the acceptance of, e.g., the 1003.4 document. The SEC also approved a request from the U.S. TAG to forward specific drafts of five TCOS standards documents to WG15 when said drafts were available. We'll know soon whether WG15 will accept any of them, since the next WG15 meeting was the week after the TCOS meetings, and also in Seattle (well, Orcas Island). Stay tuned for Dominic Dunlop's WG15 ISO Monitor Report and Susanne Smith's U.S. TAG snitch report. 3. It's dead, Jim The SEC did something that has never been done before in its history, and perhaps never in the history of IEEE standards activities. It abolished a standards committee. Fragmentation and dissolution Several meetings back, IEEE 1003.8 fragmented into several committees to discuss specific subjects related to networking (excuse me: Distribution Services; TCOS does operating system interfaces, not networking). Some of these, such as the 1003.12 Protocol Independent Interface (PII) committee and the current 1003.8 Transparent File Access (TFA) committee, are addressing topics clearly related to 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 5 - operating system interfaces and prior art, e.g., XTI and sockets for 1003.12, and NFS, RFS, and AFS for 1003.8. Others include IEEE 1003.ns for Name Space/Directory Services (NS/DS) IEEE 1224 for Message Handling Services, and IEEE 1238 for OSI Application Portability Interfaces (OSI APIs). But IEEE 1237 was about remote procedure call (RPC). It was working in an area already being addressed by another standards committee, in this case, the ANSI X3 T3.5 RPC Rapporteur Group. 1237 was also sparsely attended, and chose to meet with X3 T3.5 in the summer instead of with the other TCOS committees in Danvers in July. The 1237 committee proposed its own dissolution. Specifically, it proposed that its chair, Ken Hobday, be thanked for his activities and appointed SEC Institutional Representative to the Rapporteur Group. The general idea drew little resistance, but there was a motion to amend by tying the dissolution of 1237 to the acceptance of its work by the X3 T3.5 RPC Rapporteur Group. When it was made clear (by someone speaking for the 1237 chair, who was not present), that the 1237 members had no intention of meeting again, regardless of what the SEC did, the motion to amend failed and the original motion passed. The Bones of the SEC ``It's dead, Jim,'' remarked Parliamentarian Jason Zions to Chair Jim Isaak, and to the great satisfaction of all concerned. 4. Robert's Rules When the number of TCOS committees grew to its current double dozen, SEC meetings became rather unweildy. They seemed to last for days. Er, meetings actually do last for days (usually Tuesday and Thursday morning or evening), but a single day seemed like several. Fortunately, a parliamentarian came grunting out of Silicon Valley clutching a copy of Robert's Rules of Order. We do all appreciate Jason Zions' efforts to organize the meetings, and they now only last for days. We do get some interesting artifacts, though. A motion was made on an important topic. Many thought that action should be taken immediately, but others thought the time and the motion weren't ripe. So a motion was made to postpone discussion until January. Jason confirmed that postponement was debatable, so the mover withdrew that motion and made a motion to table, which is not debatable. Someone else made a motion to suspend the rule about motions to table not being debatable. Just before the impending vote on this third-level-deep motion, the Chair pointed out that its mover wasn't a member of the SEC. Others pointed out that the mover of the motion to table wasn't, either, because we had just abolished his committee. The Chair opined that that action wasn't really effective yet, because the IEEE Standards Board still had to confirm that action. Nonetheless, the mover withdrew the motion. Two other people 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 6 - immediately made the same motions in the same order, the motion to suspend the rules was approved, and debate ensued on the motion to table. The above parliamentary foofaraw only took about one minute. I think such amusements are a small price to pay for much less contentious and much faster meetings. In case you were wondering, eventually the motion to table was voted down and the original motion passed. 5. PAR Proliferation Prevention In the last year, the SEC has approved more than a dozen PARs for new committees or new documents. This sudden (the January 1990 SEC meeting approved 11 PARs) doubling of TCOS standards activities has led to widespread concern. PAR Acceptance Criteria In April in Utah, the SEC approved a set of nine criteria for PAR acceptance. These criteria, any of which can be waived by the SEC, range from a desire for widespread industry experience and a base document to a request for a scope of work that fits within that of TCOS-SS. This was a good first step proliferation prevention, and several PARs were either not submitted or were rejected in Snowbird because of the existence of the criteria. This has been reported on in previous editorials and snitch reports, and the criteria themselves have been posted to comp.std.unix. Project Management Committee The other half of the battle for committee curtailment was the establishment of a standing committee to apply the criteria to PARs before they reached the SEC, and to track the progress of committees against the milestones in their PARs, so that non-functional committees could be recommended for elimination. A detailed set of guidelines (including the PAR acceptance criteria and a model for their application) for such a Project Management Committee (PMC) was reported out of an ad hoc committee as a motion, which was passed unanimously. The SEC Chair announced the opening of nominations for a Chair, Secretary, and Project Editor for the PMC, to be confirmed in January. Although the movement to curtail proliferation of committees was actually started by the Institutional Representatives back in March, and though the ad hoc committee that wrote the PMC Guidelines originally intended to require a balance of representation in the PMC between IRs and other members, no such rule was incorporated in the final document. This was not seen as a problem by the IRs, since the 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 7 - PMC cannot make any actual decisions regarding PARs. The PMC only recommends, and cannot even prevent a PAR from coming before the SEC. The SEC is the group that must decide on PAR acceptance, and all the IRs are members of the SEC. We can hope that the existence of the PMC will not only rationalize the creation and abolition of standards committees, but will also shorten SEC meetings.... 6. Fees The Logistics Subcommittee, chaired by Dave Dodge, returned a report advising the raising of fees for meeting attendance. Traditionally, meeting fees helped pay for meeting rooms and related logistics like copying machines. (There is a separate fee schedule for committee mailings.) A corporate host was sought for each meeting. The host (e.g., Digital for the Seattle meeting) sponsored lunches four of five weekdays and coffee service for breaks. This wasn't a big deal when there were a few committees and maybe a hundred attendees. But with 400 attendees these days, hosting a meeting can run up to $55,000, and all the host gets is name recognition. No hosts had been found for any meeting after Seattle. So the logistics committee recommended and the SEC approved raising the fees across the board, and giving people the option of buying into the lunch plan or not. This is yet another indication of the extent of current standards activities, and of their effects on the industry. Judy's birthday present Various arguments from the logistics committee meeting were reported, such as that eliminating coffee might help. The SEC Chair noted that that wouldn't work, since that was how hotels made money, and they wouldn't like that. The USENIX IR remarked that with competent management, such as Dave Dodge and meeting organizer Judy Williams, there was no need for micromanagement by the SEC at this level. This was apparently the first time anyone had complimented Ms. Williams in an SEC meeting. She organizes the meetings very well, evidently so well that most people don't notice. Computer room One thing the logistics committee could do better would be giving direction to sponsors of the computer room (such sponsors are still sought, separately from the issue of meeting hosts). The computer room in Seattle had no UUCP or Internet access (although it did have half a dozen workstations on a network and a laser printer), and the single modem was only 2400bps and not Hayes compatible. People were scrounging mail access from local residents. Some ideas have been floated on how to do this better in New Orleans. 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 8 - 7. TIMS gets new PEP from the Spanish Inquisition The POSIX Platform Environment Profile (PEP) draft document was the base document for a PAR on something that had been submitted at the July SEC meeting in Danvers, Mass., as a TIMS (Traditional Interactive Multiuser System) PAR. The PEP PAR was submitted by TCOS-SS Chair Jim Isaak, with proposed working group chair Donn Terry. Donn Terry is the current chair of IEEE 1003.1, and all the other officers of that committee were also proposed to serve for the new PAR. This is a good example of a PAR that doesn't create a new committee, rather, it permits an existing committee to produce a new document. (Another good example was the 1003.15 Batch Processing PAR, which is being handled by the 1003.10 Supercomputing committee, and which was, incidentally, approved in Utah in April after the PAR acceptance criteria were approved by the SEC.) The PEP PAR says its scope is to ``Establish an [sic] Platform Environment Profile based on the ISO 9945 (IEEE 1003 POSIX) work and related standards which describes a simple foundation for an interactive, multiuser application platform.'' In other words, it's YAP (Yet Another Profile). It fits between more or less between the IEEE 1003.0 POSIX Guide, which is a framework or model for writing profiles, and the NIST Application Portability Profile (APP), which is a list of standards that can be used together. PEP is intended to show how to use standards to specify something that looks like a traditional UNIX system. Unlike 1003.0, it's not closely limited to the TCOS standards, and the PAR specifically mentions NIST FIPS, X/Open's work, and 9945-1 and 9945-2, as well as alluding to TCOS POSIX work like 1003.4. It even mentions the Houston 30 (an industry group of users of standards) as a party that wants this work. It's called a platform profile because it can be used as a base for the other profile efforts. This was not an especially controversial PAR (except for logistical issues such as finding enough people to attend 1003.1 meetings to do the work, especially considering that 1003.1 is already mired in LI work). It appeared likely to sail through to approval. Until someone asked to see the answers to the PAR acceptance criteria. Oops. Apparently the proposers had not prepared any, or had only prepared them for the previous TIMS PAR, or had not distributed them. This lack almost led to the PEP PAR being tabled. Instead, the SEC convened its version of the Spanish Inquisition: Donn Terry volunteered (at the instigation of the USENIX IR) to anwser the PAR criteria orally and in real time, and the whole SEC volunteered to quiz him on them. Evidently his answers satisfied enough members, since the motion to table was defeated and the PEP PAR was approved (despite a complaint from the floor that the SEC's own rules about PAR acceptance, as just adopted in the PMC Guidelines, had not been followed). 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC - 9 - The astute reader will have noticed that the Spanish Inquisition was held while an undebatable motion to table was on the floor. How could this be? See above under Robert's Rules.... 8. USENIX Participation At the Tuesday meeting, the USENIX IR asked for Weirdnix submissions (for the best legal misinterpretation of 1003.1 or 1003.2) to be sent to Jeff Haemer <jsh@ico.isc.com>. The IR then read the main points from the announcement previously posted on comp.std.unix about the USENIX Board of Directors decisions at their September meeting about standards funding: that the ISO Monitor Project was continued (contingent on EUUG support); $15K was voted to continue the snitch reports; but no funds were voted for any other USENIX standards activities, such as a USENIX Institutional Representative (including, among other things, USENIX accreditation to the SEC). The USENIX Board will entertain new proposals at their January meeting. The previous funding expires approximately at the end of October 1990. At the Thursday SEC meeting, an ad hoc group of SEC members (not including the USENIX IR) proposed a resolution to be sent by the SEC Chair to the USENIX President and Board of Directors. The SEC approved the resolution without objection, and the Chair thanked them for their direction. 1 November 1990 IEEE/CS TCOS-SS SEC Volume-Number: Volume 22, Number 110