Report on ISO POSIX meeting of June 1990
Dominic Dunlop
domo at tsa.co.uk
Thu Jul 5 23:56:01 AEST 1990
From: Dominic Dunlop <domo at tsa.co.uk>
Report on ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG15 (POSIX)
Meeting of 11th - 15th June, 1990, Paris, France
Dominic Dunlop -- domo at tsa.co.uk
The Standard Answer Ltd.
Introduction
Working Group 15 of Subcommittee 22 of Joint Technical
Committee 1 of the International Organization for
Standardization and the International Electrotechnical
Commission (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG15), or, more briefly, the
ISO POSIX working group, met in Paris, France, from the 12th
to the 15th of June. The meeting was hosted by AFNOR,
(Association francaise de normalisation), the French
national standards body, at its offices in La Defense, a
high-rise business district a brisk train-ride away from the
city centre, and was preceded on 11th June and the morning
of the 12th by meetings of the rapporteur groups on
conformance testing, internationalization and security.
Attendance was good, with thirty "experts" (as the ISO
Directives style us) representing nine countries, plus the
European Community.
I was present at the main meeting and at the
internationalization rapporteur group as an observer with
the brief of reporting back to you. This report is the
fourth jointly commissioned by the European UNIX systems
User Group (EUUG) and USENIX. As usual, it's a little
imprecise in its references to ISO. Strictly, most of these
should be to JTC1, or to some part of JTC1. Where precision
is needed, I use it and give an explanation, but for the
most part I refer simply to ISO, so as to avoid getting
bogged down in unnecessary detail. If you have any
comments, or need clarification or further information,
please contact me at the mail address above.
First, a summary of the most important aspects of the
meeting:
Summary
o POSIX.1, the operating system interface standard,
should be published as international standard 9945-1
Real Soon Now. As I write, the ballot on the document
has yet to close, but it seems unlikely that any of the
twenty countries voting will oppose acceptance. The
meeting identified a number of trivial editorial
changes to the current draft international standard,
and these, taken together with continuing nit-picking
comments from ISO's central secretariat, should result
in a document which ISO will print. Its technical
content will be identical to that of
- 2 -
ANSI/IEEE Std. 1003.1:1988, so implementors following
the U.S. standard can be assured of ISO compliance when
9945-1 finally sees the light of day.
o POSIX.2, the shell and tools standard, faces a bumpier
ride before becoming international standard 9945-2. In
an ISO ballot on acceptance of draft 9 of IEEE 1003.2
as a draft international standard, six countries voted
against, with just five in favour. This is more of an
embarrassment than a set-back: hindsight suggests that
it was just too early to hold a ballot.
o Showing its increasing concern and frustration at the
lack of apparent progress within the IEEE on a
(programming) language-independent version of the POSIX
operating system interface standard, WG15 has refused
to "register" the current, largely language-
independent, draft of the 1003.4 realtime extensions
standard on the grounds that it makes little sense to
have language-independent extensions to a base standard
which is specified in terms of the C language.
Similarly, the group failed to register 1003.5 (Ada
binding) and 1003.9 (FORTRAN-77 binding) because
POSIX.1 lacks an explicit service definition to which
they can bind.
o The failure to register these documents causes a hiccup
-- albeit a discreet one -- in the synchronization
between IEEE and ISO POSIX standardization schedules.
In the hope of avoiding such situations in the future,
an informal "speak now, or forever hold your peace"
mechanism has been put in place, allowing the
international community to comment on the subject area,
format, presentation and approach of IEEE documents at
an early stage in their preparation.
o Had it not been for this upset, the working group would
have adopted a firm synchronization plan so as to
ensure that the work of IEEE and of ISO is closely
coordinated in the future. As it is, the "U.S. member
body" -- ANSI -- has been asked to provide a revised
plan for the working group's October meeting in
Seattle.
o The Open Software Foundation, UNIX International and
X/Open are cooperating on a common approach to
conformance testing, known as Phoenix. Governmental
organizations with a strong interest in the field, such
as the National Institute for Science and Technology
(NIST) and the Commission of European Communities
(CEC), seem broadly to welcome this move -- even if the
- 3 -
unaccustomed show of tripartite unity is, as one
security rapporteur put it, "a bit spooky".
o At an evening reception hosted by AFUU (Association
francaise des utilizateurs de UNIX), the French UNIX
users' group, Mike Lambert of X/Open said that "our
hand is extended" to the international standardization
community, with which his organization hopes to work in
finding some more timely and responsive way of
delivering formal consensus standards for open systems.
The definition of this mechanism is left as an exercise
for the reader -- or for the international standards
community. Perhaps Mike has come to realize that
standardizers too are prone to the Not Invented Here
syndrome, and so must believe that they thought of
something themselves before they can accept it.
o Just to keep us all on our toes, ISO has updated its
Directives, with the result that the procedure for
turning a base document -- such as one of the IEEE
drafts -- into an international standard is subtly
changed. We now have to forget about Draft Proposals,
and turn our minds instead to Working Drafts and
Committee Drafts. Sigh...
The rest of this report gives more detail most of these
topics.
9945-1_--_Operating_System_Interface
You may recall from my report of WG15's last meeting in
October, 1989, that the group had in effect told ISO's
central secretariat that, while the then-current draft of
IS 9945-1 was not perfect, it was, in the group's opinion,
good enough to publish, particularly since we'd undertake to
fix things up on short order, allowing an improved version
to be published within a year of the first edition.
This proposal did not fly. Firstly, the central secretariat
(now dynamically known as ITTF, the Information Technology
Task Force), refused to publish a document that looked much
more like an IEEE standard than an ISO standard; secondly,
they deemed the changes needed to polish up the draft to be
sufficiently great that it should go out to ballot again in
order to provide a formal check that it was still acceptable
to the group. This was duly done; the ballot closed on 29th
June, and is expected to pass very comfortably.
Nevertheless, the ballot gave people the opportunity to
comment formally on the document again, with the result that
a number of small bug-fixes and clarifications were
- 4 -
suggested, and were accepted for incorporation into the
draft. We judge -- and we hope that ITTF agrees -- the
changes are strictly editorial, and so will not merit yet
another ballot. ITTF, which, in discussion with the IEEE,
had slightly bent its drafting and presentation rules so as
to come up with a compromise satisfactory to both parties,
also suggested further changes, some in areas that we
thought had already been addressed. This is a cause for
concern: the prospect of the standard never being published
because its layout and language do not meet some ill-defined
guidelines does not appeal. Consequently, we are seeking
"written harmonized editorial requirements" from the IEEE
and ITTF.
The ballot also produced a number of suggestions in the area
of internationalization, such as how to handle (and indeed,
how to refer to) wide, or multi-byte, characters. To have
acted on these comments would have changed the technical
content of the draft standard -- the equivalent of sliding
down a snake in the game that leads to eventual publication.
Happily, those who suggested the changes were content to
leave these issues for the second edition of the standard,
rather than further delay the first edition.
The single exception that we could get away with was to
replace Annex E's1 example international profile for the
hypothetical (and extremely odd) land of Poz with a real
example for the (only slightly odd) country of Denmark.
Although this is a large change, it can be made because the
annex (ISO-speak for appendix) is "non-normative"; that is,
it is an explanatory example rather than a part of the
official standard.
Messaging, an issue which is currently exercising the minds
of those concerned with the next edition of the 1003.1
standard[1], was also passed over by WG15: nobody had a
strong preference for either the X/Open proposal or the
UniForum proposal, so 1003.1 will have to handle the issue
without guidance from from the ISO working group.
Where all does this leave us? With no published
international standard as yet, but with a very good prospect
of having one this year. Until it arrives, keep using the
bilious green book, IEEE std. 1003.1:19882, as its technical
__________
1. This material is not in the published
IEEE std. 1003.1:1988.
- 5 -
content is identical to that of the eventual ISO standard.
9945-2_--_Shell_and_Tools
Earlier in the year, there had been a ballot on moving
forward draft proposal (DP) 9945-2, Shell and utility
application interface for computer operating system
environments, to become a draft international standard
(DIS). Basically, while a DP is allowed -- even expected --
to differ considerably from the international standard which
ultimately results, a DIS is expected to be in a format and
to have contents which are very close to those of the
ultimate standard3. That the ballot was six against to just
five for (with nine countries not voting) indicates that the
consensus is that 9945-2 has to go through quite a few more
changes before it can be acceptable as an international
standard.
Many of these changes concern internationalization, as this
topic affects POSIX.2 considerably more than POSIX.1. For
example, the example Danish national profile to be
incorporated into 9945-1 is just a part of the work that DS
(Dansk Standardiseringraad) has done on the topic; the rest
affects 9945-2. There is also an unresolved issue
concerning the definition of collation sequences (sorting
orders) for international character sets. Utilities such as
sort clearly need to know about collation sequence, and so
do the regular expression-handling utilities and functions
defined by POSIX.2. The problem is that nobody in ISO seems
to want to handle the matter. In particular, JTC1/SC2,
which standardizes coded character sets, sees its job as
assigning codes to characters, not as saying anything about
how those codes should sort4. This is a reasonable
attitude: collation is a surprisingly complex field, and to
____________________________________________________________
2. You can buy a copy by calling IEEE customer service on
+1 908 981 1393 (1 800 678 IEEE inside the U.S.) and
giving them a credit card number. The cost is $37, plus
$4 for overseas surface mail, plus another $15 for
airmail. Alternatively, your national standards body
may be able to sell you a copy. For example, BSI in the
U.K. has them for sale at pounds 24.
3. DP 9945-2 is the last that we will see; under the new
directives, DPs are no more; they are replaced by
working drafts (WDs), which become committee drafts
(CDs) before becoming DISs. This is not a big deal.
- 6 -
attempt to cover it in coded character set standards would
break the ISO rule of one topic, one standard. This is all
very well, but 9945-2 needs somebody to do the work, and
WG15 may end up doing it itself if pleas for help from
elsewhere in ISO fail.
More work is on the way: 1003.2a, the User Portability
Extension to POSIX.2, was registered for ballot as a
Proposed Draft Amendment (PDAM) to DP 9945-2, giving the
international community a chance to say what it thinks of
the idea of standardizing interactive commands such as vi
and language processors like cc -- or rather c89.
Coordination
The coordination arrangements which will make IEEE and ISO
work on POSIX march forward in lock-step were almost
complete before the small international rebellion on the
matter of language independence made us stumble. (See
below.) Because WG15 failed to register 1003.4, 1003.5 and
1003.9 at this meeting, the plan must be adjusted, although
little slippage should result. We'll try to jump on board
the revised plan at the next meeting.
Internationalization
In the one and a half days before the main meeting of WG15,
its three rapporteur groups met. I attended the
internationalization meeting, which had a hectic time of it:
as the only rapporteur group directly concerned with the
current content of 9945-1 and -2, we had a lot of comments
to sift through prior to the main meeting. This we did, by
the skin of our teeth. Our conclusions are largely
reflected in the actions on the two drafts, reported above.
Security
The security rapporteur group is just getting off the
ground. As with internationalization, activities scattered
throughout JTC1 have to do with security. But in contrast
to the current situation for internationalization, for
security there is a (very new) subcommittee, SC27.
Conceivably, SC27 could define some all-encompassing ISO
security model5 which would not suit POSIX and the work of
__________
4. For oblique confirmation from "the father of ASCII", see
[2].
- 7 -
1003.6, which is eventually to be integrated into the 9945
standards. The rapporteur group is doing all that it can to
prevent this from happening. Happily, ISO is already aware
of the issue, and has formed a special working group on
security, to which WG15 will be sending a representative.
Conformance_Testing
The proceedings of the rapporteur group on conformance
testing were rather overshadowed by the announcement of
Project Phoenix. Quite from what ashes this has risen we
did not learn; however, as it involves cooperation between
the Open Software Foundation (OSF), UNIX International and
X/Open, it is difficult to resist the temptation to
speculate. But resist I shall...
The goal of Phoenix is to develop a common conformance
testing suite and methodology for the three organizations,
or, to put it another way, to harmonize their activities in
this area. Harmonization of standards for open systems is
an important issue for WG15 in general. The issue affects
the rapporteur group on conformance testing in particular
because the European Community and NIST are giving a high
priority to accrediting test houses which can check
conformance to open systems standards. This means that they
need to ensure that uniform test methods are being
consistently applied. The rapporteur group will address
this issue at its next meeting. In the mean time, WG15 has
registered the current draft of the first part of 1003.3,
which describes general test procedures, and we will review
it before our next meeting -- despite the fact that there is
as yet no well-defined route by which POSIX.3 can become an
international standard.
Language_Independence
The issue of a making the POSIX standards independent of any
particular computer language came to the fore at this
meeting. What's all the fuss about? Well, ISO has firm --
and, in my view, sensible -- ideas about how to write
standards which define the services available from
information processing systems. Building on the doctrine
that one standard should address just one topic, there
____________________________________________________________
5. ISO likes models, and they're not without their uses.
Work on a useful model for open systems is under way in
several forums.
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should be, says ISO, one document defining the service, and
one or more documents describing ways of accessing that
service. For example, a browse through the open systems
interconnection standards reveals several groupings such as
IS 8072, Transport Service Definition and IS 8073,
Connection oriented transport protocol specification; and
IS 8649, Service definition for the Association Control
Service Element, and IS 8650, Protocol specification for the
Association Control Service Element6. Similarly, in text
communication, there is IS 9066-1, Reliable transfer --
model and service definition and IS 9066-2, Reliable
transfer -- protocol specification, and in graphics,
IS 7942, Graphical Kernel System functional description and
IS 8651-1 through -3 giving GKS language bindings for
FORTRAN, Pascal and Ada. (8651-4, giving bindings for C, is
in the works.)
POSIX, ISO has ordained, must eventually go along with this
model, with the result that IS 9945-1, -2, and -3 (Operating
system interface, shell and utilities, and administration
respectively) will be concerned simply with defining
services, and will not be bound to any particular
programming language. The key word here is "eventually":
because of the pressing need for an international standard
for POSIX, a waiver has been granted, allowing the first
version of the 9945-1 and -2 standards to be a combination
of (purists might say "a collision between") a service
definition and a C language binding to those services. The
expectation is that a future revised new edition of each
standard will be language-independent, and that bindings for
the C language will be published as a separate standard at
the same time7.
So far, so good. But this is where the problems start.
While this mandated future appears a long way off if one
looks at the IEEE's work on POSIX.1, it seems very close
__________
6. Browsing through OSI standards may be a cure for
insomnia. On the other hand, it may aggravate
hypertension...
7. Under ISO's procedures, the bindings standards for POSIX
will be allocated an ISO standard number just as soon as
we register a base document for one of them. Until that
happens, I shall have to refer to "future bindings
standards", rather than having a convenient number to
use as a handle.
- 9 -
when POSIX.4 (realtime extensions), POSIX.5 (Ada bindings)
and POSIX.9 (FORTRAN-77 bindings) are considered. In the
case of POSIX.4, language-independent extensions are being
proposed for a standard which is not itself (yet) language-
independent. And POSIX.5 and POSIX.9 define bindings to a
set of services which is not explicitly defined, but rather
is defined implicitly in terms of the binding to the C
language given in POSIX.1. In the absence of a clear
service definition, it is no surprise that, for good reasons
which have to do with their respective languages, the Ada, C
and FORTRAN versions of the operating system interface
appear currently to be binding to slightly different sets of
services.
To some, the whole issue of language independence seems like
an unnecessary and irksome imposition by ISO. In a recent
posting to comp.std.unix[3], Doug Gwyn wrote:
[Those of us who worked on 1003.1] did NOT set out
to create a language-independent standard; C was
specifically chosen for the obvious reason that it
was the SOLE appropriate language for systems-
level programming on UNIX, for a variety of
reasons, including the fact that the UNIX kernel
has a marked preference for being fed C data
types.
It is certainly true that, because, back in 1985, all the
base documents for the IEEE POSIX work were written in terms
of a C language interface, the working group made a good
pragmatic decision to produce a standard centered on C. A
different decision would have resulted in the standard which
took longer to get out of the door, and which would not have
been any more useful to its primary audience -- committed
UNIX users concerned with the divergence among
implementations of their chosen operating system. But the
success of UNIX and of its offspring, POSIX, has greatly
widened the audience for the standard. Whether we like it
or not, ISO has revisited the original decision so as to
ensure that the international standards for POSIX meet the
needs of this new audience. As a result (to continue
quoting from [3]):
This "language binding" nonsense was foisted off
on P1003 in an attempt to meet ISO guidelines. I
think it must have been adopted by ISO as the
result of Pascal types insisting that they never
have to use any other language.
Countering this, I would contend that, while the number of
"Pascal types" is too small for their opinion to be of prime
- 10 -
concern, the number of FORTRAN types, COBOL types and
perhaps even of Ada types is large enough that it would be
at least polite to provide some well-defined means whereby
these communities can create bindings which allow them to
hook into POSIX services without having to learn a new
programming language. In the future, the growing C++
community may decide to define the interface to POSIX
services in an object-oriented manner; Steve Carter paid us
a flying visit with news from the ANSI X3J16 C++ committee
in order to open up channels of communication.
Consider another topic which has come to the fore as POSIX
has moved into the international arena: internationalization
-- mechanisms which will allow non-English speakers to use
POSIX-compliant systems without having to learn a new
natural language. Like the current movement towards
separating service definitions from bindings, this involves
a considerable amount of work, yet does not appear to
provide much that is of use to UNIX' original community of
technical users. Accommodating the preferences
(prejudices?) of ever greater numbers of people is, it seems
to me, part of the price of success for the UNIX operating
system. And it may well pay dividends. For example,
internationalization work on regular expressions and
collating has resulted in facilities which will be of use
even to English speakers.
Returning to the matter of the programming language used for
bindings, it is true that AT&T-derived UNIX implementations
prefer a diet of C data types. However, it certainly was an
aim of 1003.1 to allow hosted POSIX implementations, which
might well be riding on underlying operating systems with
entirely different tastes. As a topical example,
lightweight kernels such as Chorus and Mach live on
messages, suggesting that their services could be bound to a
data stream encoding8. I suspect that anybody who has tried
to make ioctl() work across a network wishes that UNIX had
anticipated their needs by following such a model from the
start. But it didn't, and to redefine it in these terms
would be a large piece of work which (thankfully) is a long
way beyond the scope of WG15.
__________
8. More ISO-speak: broadly, if you have a protocol that
lives above layer five (session) of the OSI stack, you'd
better call it a data stream encoding. For example, the
protocol for the X Window System is a data stream
encoding by this definition.
- 11 -
There is no way in which all such requirements could have
been anticipated, and accommodating the most important of
them as the need arises inevitably causes pain. Both
language independence and internationalization are
unanticipated requirements which the international community
wants retrofitted to POSIX on short order. And it's ANSI,
as provider of the base documents to ISO, and the IEEE, as
the body accredited by ANSI to produce the documents, that
get beat on to do the real work, and to suffer the pain.
In the view of WG15, the real work needed to make POSIX.1 a
logical base for extensions such as POSIX.4, POSIX.5 and
POSIX.9 is not being done fast enough. Trouble is, all
standards are produced by volunteers -- often volunteers who
have had to make a case to their managements that there's
some percentage in their company being involved in standards
work. There is clearly an eventual percentage in language
independence for suppliers of POSIX-conformant systems if it
encourages users of languages not traditionally found on
UNIX systems to migrate to POSIX. But sadly, while not in
any way criticizing the quality of the work done to date,
there aren't enough IEEE volunteers interested in recasting
POSIX.1 into language-independent form.
Maybe, just maybe, if the international community is more
interested than the U.S. in getting this work done, WG15
should encourage more people from outside the U.S. to
participate actively and directly in the work of the IEEE.
(Or, to put it another way, encourage more organizations
outside the U.S. to put their hands more deeply into their
pockets in order to pay for people to attend IEEE POSIX
working group meetings.) The alternative is that WG15 does
the work itself -- an alternative I'd rather not
contemplate.
For now, two action items on ANSI from WG15 sum up the
situation:
Pursue with vigour the production of a language-
independent version of both 9945-1 and P1003.4 in
conjunction with a C language binding for each in
order that they are eligible as replacements for
9945-1:1990.
Request the IEEE to expedite the completion of the
language independent specification of 9945-1 that
is precisely functionally equivalent to the
existing 9945-1:1990 and provide a C language
binding that is syntactically and semantically
identical; and request that a detailed proposal
status report on this issue including a
- 12 -
synchronization proposal be presented at the next
meeting of WG15.
Next_Meeting
The next meeting of WG15 is in Seattle from 23rd to 26th
October -- the week after the IEEE POSIX working group
meeting in the same city (and the same week as the EUUG
meeting in Nice, France9). Should be interesting!
__________
9. In two meetings, WG15 has managed to clash both with
summer USENIX and with autumn EUUG. It almost looks as
if we do it on purpose! But we don't, and will try to
do better next year...
- 13 -
REFERENCES
1. June, 1990 Standards Update, Jeffrey S. Haemer,
comp.std.unix Volume 20, Number 66, USENIX, 30 June 1990
2. Letter from R. W. Bremer, pp 34-35, Byte, volume 15,
number 6, June 1990
3. Doug Gwyn, comp.std.unix Volume 20, Number 51, USENET,
27 June 1990
Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 110
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