Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!longway!std-unix From: std-unix@longway.TIC.COM (Moderator, John S. Quarterman) Newsgroups: comp.std.unix Subject: Standards Update (3: IEEE P1003 Activities) Message-ID: <178@longway.TIC.COM> Date: 18 Apr 88 03:59:48 GMT Reply-To: std-unix@uunet.uu.net Lines: 199 Approved: jsq@longway.tic.com (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