Standards Update (3: IEEE P1003 Activities)

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

                      Standards Update
           An update on UNIX Standards Activities

                       April 17, 1988

             Written for the USENIX Association
              by Shane P. McCarron, NAPS Inc.

IEEE P1003 Activities:

As I mentioned above, the POSIX committees met in Washington
D.C. in March.  For the first time, all 7 of the committees
met.  As you can imagine, it was pretty difficult to catch
all of what went on, but here are the highlights:

P1003.0 - POSIX Guide Project:

This group met for the first time in Washington.  Although
they didn't get a lot of tangible work done, they did
establish what their goals were, as well as starting to put
together a timetable for production of their guide document.
I don't have the details of this yet, but I will next
quarter.

P1003.1 - System Services Interface:

This group met to decide what we are going to be working on
in the future.  We have a few items that must be handled by
the .1 group, and some that could be.  Currently there are
three projects being worked on by members of the committee:

   - Language Independent Description

     The ISO POSIX Working Group has requested that a
     language independent version of the .1 standard be
     produced as soon as possible after completion of the
     standard.  Language bindings (like the current
     descriptions that are in the standard and the work
     being done by the .5 group) would be placed in
     supplements to the main standard, or in chapters within
     the standard itself.

   - Improved Archive Format

     Although the ISO community agrees that CPIO and USTAR
     are fine for the first cut of the standard, they have
     requested that .1 work on a more robust archive format
     that doesn't have the technical drawbacks of either, as
     well as one that takes into account the security
     features needed for trusted systems.

IEEE P1003 Activities, April 17,S1h9a8n8e P. McCarron, NAPS Inc.


Standards Update           - 2 -          USENIX Association

   - Terminal Interface Extensions

     Yes - we mean curses/Terminfo.  Well, not really, but
     something very much like that.  It will have to be
     something that resembles current practice (I imagine),
     but it could be improved in little ways.  There was a
     lot of sentiment in the group for throwing out all of
     the Terminfo stuff and starting from scratch, but I
     don't think it will happen.  We will probably get some
     proposals that are wildly different from existing
     practice, but it is outside the group's charter to
     totally supplant existing practice.

P1003.2 - Shell and Tools Interface:

The .2 Group got a lot of work done in Washington.  They
went in with a 400 page draft 5, and by end of May a 450+
page draft 6 should be completed.  This draft 6 will be used
as the basis of the interim FIPS that the NBS will be using
for their Interim FIPS on POSIX (see above).

The most significant developments in .2 were:

   - Source Code Control

     The committee felt that source code control was outside
     the scope of the standard, and it was removed (it had
     been added at the last meeting).  A number of people
     still feel that some form of source code control should
     be in there, so the committee left a place in the
     document where it could be put back in later.  The real
     danger here is that the RCS people and the SCCS people
     will get into a religious war similar to the one that
     erupted between the TAR and CPIO factions in the .1
     group.

   - Basic Shell Changes

     There were many features of the Bourne shell that had
     been included in .2 for historic reasons.  At this
     meeting the shell subcommittee agreed to remove some of
     those anachronisms.  This will make way for (possibly)
     more enhancements to the basic shell mechanism in the
     future (e.g., substring manipulation).

   - Software Installation

     Two drafts past there was a very complex system in the
     standard that allowed software installation in a
     portable way.  This was removed in the December
     meeting, and replaced at the March meeting by a very

IEEE P1003 Activities, April 17,S1h9a8n8e P. McCarron, NAPS Inc.


Standards Update           - 3 -          USENIX Association

     simple interface that should be acceptable to everyone.
     Although the details are not all clear, it looks like
     this will consist of an implementation defined command
     that will read the first file off of a POSIX conforming
     archive (tape) and execute it.  Anyway, something about
     that difficult.

   - Electronic Mail Interface

     Mailx was added in Draft 5 as a proposed way to
     portably transmit mail.  Some committee members felt
     that the way in which it was described was too
     restrictive, while others felt that it was too liberal.
     In a compromise move, another interface was defined
     that allows very simple mail transmission in a portable
     manner.  It also has a name that doesn't conflict with
     existing utilities.

P1003.3 - Testing and Verification:

At the March meeting the chair announced that they were on
target for completing the assertion lists for P1003.1, and
that the .3 standard for .1 would be ready to ballot just as
soon as the .1 standard was ratified.  He also stated pretty
clearly that P1003.3 didn't want to work as hard when
generating verification standards for the other POSIX
committees.  He asked that in the future the standards be
written in a way that makes it easier to develop assertion
lists.  The .3 committee will be working closely with the .2
effort (which is a little too far along to fix now), but the
other committees will be changing their documents to reflect
what assertion tests can be made about each function or
command being defined.  This should make it easier to
produce verification documents for those standards.

P1003.4 - Real Time:

This committee made a lot of progress in the March meeting.
However, they have a long road ahead of them, and I don't
know that anything earth shattering happened - certainly
nothing that I heard about.  However, they have stated a
target of 1990 for completion, and at this point it is a
little early to draw any sort of conclusions.

P1003.5 - Ada Binding for the System Services Interface:

The Ada group is still a very young committee, but they are
moving right along.  At the very least they are generating a
lot of paper, but it has some excellent stuff on it.
Although they haven't been a working group long, I expect to
see a draft from them in the next six months, and a standard

IEEE P1003 Activities, April 17,S1h9a8n8e P. McCarron, NAPS Inc.


Standards Update           - 4 -          USENIX Association

being balloted in a year.  Although this may seem like a
long time, it is really short work for a standards
committee.  Unfortunately, their work is very dependent on
.1 getting a language independent description of the System
Services Interface put together as quickly as possible.
They have already looked into ways of describing POSIX
independent of any language, and they will be helping .1 get
this firmed up.

P1003.6 - Security:

This was the first meeting of .6 as a real IEEE committee.
They defined their scope and objectives, set a tentative
production schedule, and defined the format of their
document.  As a /usr/group technical committee they produced
a number of white papers, and I expect to see drafts coming
out of the group based on those papers shortly.  The only
snag here is that the transition from a /usr/group technical
committee to an IEEE working group wasn't as smooth as
others have been.  To help alleviate some of the tension
this caused, the next .6 meeting will be held in conjunction
with USENIX in San Francisco in June, instead of with the
POSIX committees in July.  After that they will follow the
regular POSIX meeting schedule.

IEEE P1003 Activities, April 17,S1h9a8n8e P. McCarron, NAPS Inc.

Volume-Number: Volume 14, Number 7