Austin Group Minutes of the 7 October Teleconference Austin-224 Page 1 of 1
Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group.              October 8, 2004

Attendees

Andrew Josey, The Open Group
Nick Stoughton, USENIX, ISO/IEC OR
Don Cragun , Sun, PASC OR

Apologies

Ulrich Drepper, Red Hat
Mark Brown, IBM, TOG OR


Face to Face
----------------
It is proposed that the next face to face meeting be held
during the week commencing January 10 2005, and be held
at The Open Group offices in Reading UK.

Andrew will confirm the arrangements and post further information
on the site in the next few days. He requested the ORs to notify
their constituents.


Defect Report Processing
-------------------------
The group picked up on the latest batch of defect reports,
which are available at the following URL:
http://www.opengroup.org/austin/aardvark/latest/

XCU ERN 39 pathchk Accept as marked below


This is being handled as an interpretation request.

Interpretation response:

The standards states the requirements for portable filenames and
the behavior for the pathchk utility, and conforming implementations must
conform to this. However, concerns have been raised about this
which are being referred to the sponsor.

Rationale:
It is believed that the intent of the former POSIX.1-1990 and POSIX.2-1992
standards was that the constraint on use of the hyphen character as the
first character of a portable filename is a constraint on application
behavior and not on implementations, since applications might not work
as expected when such a filename is passed as a command line argument.

Notes to the Editor for a future revision(not part of the interpretation)

XBD Chapter 3 Definitions 3.170 Filename Portability is
not a definition, it is advice on why filenames
should be constructed from the portable filename character set,
and should be moved elsewhere (see below)

Remove Definition 3.170

Change XBD Chapter 4 Global Concepts 4.6  Filenames 

From:

"4.6 Filenames

For a filename to be portable across implementations conforming to IEEE
Std 1003.1-2001, it shall consist only of the portable filename character
set as defined in Portable Filename Character Set.

The hyphen character shall not be used as the first character of a
portable filename. Uppercase and lowercase letters shall retain their
unique identities between conforming implementations. In the case of a
portable pathname, the slash character may also be used."


To:

"4.6 Filenames

Uppercase and lowercase letters shall retain their
unique identities between conforming implementations. "

Insert new General Concept into XBD after 4.6 Filenames and before
4.7 File Times Update"

"4.X Filename Portability

For a filename to be portable across implementations conforming to IEEE
Std 1003.1-2001, it shall consist only of the portable filename character
set as defined in Portable Filename Character Set.

Portable filenames shall not have the hyphen character as the first character
since this may cause problems when filenames are passed as command
line arguments."

Insert new RATIONALE into XRAT before A.4.7 File Times Update

"A.4.X

Filenames should be constructed from the portable filename character
set because the use of other characters can be confusing or ambiguous
in certain contexts. (For example, the use of a colon ( ':' ) in a
pathname could cause ambiguity if that pathname were included in a
PATH definition.)

[The constraint on use of the hyphen character as the
first character of a portable filename is a constraint on application
behavior and not on implementations, since applications might not work
as expected when such a filename is passed as a command line argument.]"

(wording in [] suggested by AJ after the meeting)

For pathchk it was agreed that we need to address the hyphen character
issue, and that pathchk must be able to issue a diagnostic when it
encounters it.  We discussed whether the new behavior should be added to
the -p option rather than a new -P option.  If the new behavior was added
to  -p there were concerns raised about how to maintain conformance to the
current and previous standards.  The approach of adding a new -P option
allows backwards compatibility, and yet allows existing implementations
to implement the future direction.

In XCU pathchk (2004 ed , p696)

Insert at the end of the OPTIONS section
in the pathck utility

"-P  Write a diagnostic for each pathname operand  that contains a
component whose first character is the hyphen character"

In the pathchk SYNOPSIS section change 
From :
"pathchk [-p] pathname...."
To:
"pathchk [-p] [-P]  pathname...."

In the pathchk DESCRIPTION section
Change the last sentence of the  first paragraph 
From:
"More extensive portability checks are provided by the -p option."
To:
"More extensive portability checks are provided by the -p 
and -P options."

Add to the pathchk APPLICATION USAGE 
"To verify that a pathname meets the requirements of filename portability,
applications should use both -p and -P options together."

Add to the pathckh RATIONALE

"For historical purposes -p does not check for the use of the hyphen
character as the first character in a component of the pathname."



Next Steps
-----------
Andrew  will update the aardvark reports with the latest inbound
defect reports.

There are a number of open action items outstanding:
1. Don Cragun Pathname Resolution proposal
2. Larry Dwyer system() and threads
3. Joerg Schilling wording for XCU ERN 1 pax

The next teleconference call is scheduled for  Oct 14 2004