status report

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

From: uunet!unisoft!hlj (Hal Jespersen)


	    P1003.2 Working Group Status Report--October 1988

			      Hal Jespersen

			   UniSoft Corporation

       November	6, 1988

       The P1003.2 POSIX Shell and Utilities Working Group met in
       Honolulu, Hawaii, October 24 through 28,	1988.

       The following were the highlights of the	meeting:

	 1.  The P1003.2 Technical Editor, Maggie Lee, of Amdahl
	     Corporation, resigned her position	because	of workload
	     conflicts.	Maggie served in this position since April
	     1987 and the Working Group	expressed their	sincere
	     thanks for	all the	outstanding work she did on Drafts
	     3 through 7.  Hal Jespersen will assume these duties
	     as	editor until a suitable	replacement can	be found.
	     An	arrangement of chapter editors feeding materials
	     into an overall draft editor may be attempted.

	 2.  The results of the	``mock ballot''	against	Draft 7
	     were processed almost the entire week.  The Working
	     Group did an outstanding job of submitting	objections-
	     --over 1400--on a very tight schedule; they repeated
	     the feat by resolving almost all of them during the
	     week.  As a result, Draft 8 will be a draft of
	     considerably higher quality and will be a good start
	     for the formal balloting process.

	 3.  A schedule	for balloting was discussed.  The balloting
	     group for 1003.2 closes in	early November;	the exact
	     date is unknown (but it is	probably before	you're
	     reading this report).  Draft 8 will be targeted for
	     completion	of editing December 5, 1988, although the
	     exceptionally high	volume of changes may delay this
	     until the 12th.  Assuming that the	IEEE office
	     receives it in mid-December, a balloting period of
	     January 1 through February	15, 1989 is probable.
	     Considering the experiences of P1003.1, it	is very
	     likely that final approval	will not be reached before
	     December, 1989, for approval at the January, 1990,
	     Standards Board meeting.

	 4.  Some of the significant changes to	appear in Draft	8:

	       a.  A new Chapter 7 was accepted, based on software
		   for application installation	developed by
		   Digital Equipment Corp.


       P1003.2 Status Report 10/88				  2

	       b.  The chapters	will be	rearranged slightly.
		   Chapter 3 (Environment) will	be merged into 2
		   (Definitions).  The C language bias of Draft	7
		   will	be negated by establishing a new language-
		   independent bindings	chapter	(just stubs for
		   now).  The C	language bindings will appear in a
		   separate chapter, clearly marked as destined	for
		   removal in a	future draft, after a separate C
		   bindings working group is established.  (At the
		   meeting, it was discussed putting them into a
		   ``normative appendix,'' but I have since found
		   out that that isn't normal IEEE procedure, so
		   they'll have	to be in real chapters to stay in
		   the standard.)  A decision was made to not
		   include an empty chapter for	Ada bindings, as an
		   active working group	is already in progress for
		   Ada,	so that	chapter	has a home of its own in
		   their standard.  Separate chapters for C and
		   FORTRAN development tools will point	back to	a
		   new language-independent compiler-linker
		   section.

	       c.  The egrep and fgrep commands	have been merged
		   into	a single new grep.

	       d.  The xform command was removed as unnecessary.

	       e.  The UUCP-oriented commands were moved to an
		   appendix, awaiting balloting	group direction	for
		   inclusion in	the standard.

	       f.  Major surgery was performed on the hd command,
		   which was also renamed xd, to avoid collisions
		   with	vendor commands.

	       g.  The strip command was added to the Software
		   Development chapter.

	 5.  A draft PAR for a ``User Portability Extension'' (UPE)
	     was discussed.  This supplement to	1003.2 is intended
	     to	provide	many of	the familiar interactive UNIX
	     utilities,	such as	full screen editors, omitted from
	     the original P1003.2 scope.  It will promote user
	     portability, but there are	two caveats:  users are
	     limited to	being traditional time-sharing UNIX users,
	     such as program developers, and; the terminals
	     supported are limited to asynchronous character-mode
	     terminals,	such as	VT100's.  Advanced work	into
	     windows or	mouse-based systems is specifically
	     excluded.	The Working Group will spend the majority
	     of	1989 on	this extension.	 The PAR will be submitted


       P1003.2 Status Report 10/88				  3

	     in	late November, 1988.

	 6.  The NIST (formerly	NBS) confirmed plans to	issue a
	     POSIX Shell and Tools FIPS	based on Draft 8 in
	     December.	They are planning on accepting the entire
	     draft with	the exception of some of the
	     internationalization features and the nascent
	     application installation material;	and, the software
	     development options will remain optional.

       The next	meeting	is scheduled for January 9 - 12, 1989, in
       Fort Lauderdale,	Florida.  (Embassy Suites Hotel, 1000 SE
       17th Street.  (305) 527-7000; specify group rate	for ``IEEE
       P1003 meeting.)	Since the balloting against Draft 8 will
       still be	in its early stages, this is an	abbreviated meeting
       that will concentrate almost entirely on	the new	UPE
       supplement.  January 9 -	11 is for the full Working Group;
       January 12 is reserved for balloting coordination by the
       technical reviewers.

	     Subsequent	meetings:

	     April 24 -	28, 1989      St Paul, Minnesota.

	     July 10 - 14, 1989	      San Francisco, California.

	     October 16	- 20, 1989    Brussels,	Belgium.

				     Hal Jespersen, Chair P1003.2
				     UniSoft Corp
				     6121 Hollis Street
				     Emeryville, CA 94608-2092
				     (415) 420-6410, ext 448
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