Austin Group Status Report                      Austin-241r1 Page 1 of 1
Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group.              January 20, 2005
                                                                                

The Austin Common Standards Revision Group (CSRG) is a joint technical
working group established to consider the matter of a common revision
of ISO/IEC 9945-1, ISO/IEC 9945-2, IEEE Std 1003.1, IEEE Std 1003.2 and
the appropriate parts of the Single UNIX Specification. Having
completed the initial deliverable in late 2001, the group is presently
working on maintenance activities including producing two technical
corrigenda so far, and interpretations of the standard. Looking
forward, the group has laid out an initial roadmap for the
next revision (see later).  

The most recent documentation deliverable is the 2004 edition of the
standard published on April 30 2004.

The IEEE and The Open Group 2004 edition of the standard was published
April 30 2004, and replaces the previous two editions.
The 2004 Edition is formally known as:

    IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition
    The Open Group Technical Standard Base Specifications, Issue 6
     
    Includes IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001/Cor 1-2002 
    and IEEE Std 1003.1-2001/Cor 2-2004 

and it's worth noting that within the text the standard is still referred
to as IEEE Std 1003.1-2001.

The standard is also an ISO/IEC international standard, denoted as ISO/IEC
9945:2003 and comprises four parts:

Part 1: Base Definitions
Part 2: System Interfaces
Part 3: Shell and Utilities
Part 4: Rationale

ISO/IEC decided to publish technical corrigenda rather than
produce a new 2004 edition. The technical corrigenda
were published in September 2004 and have the designations
	ISO/IEC 9945-1:2003/Cor.1:2004(E)
	ISO/IEC 9945-2:2003/Cor.1:2004(E)
	ISO/IEC 9945-3:2003/Cor.1:2004(E)
	ISO/IEC 9945-4:2003/Cor.1:2004(E)
respectively. Final text in pdf of the ISO Technical Corrigenda
(corrections to the 2003 Edition) is freely available from the ISO
web site.

During 2004, IEEE and The Open Group have granted the Linux Man pages
project and the FreeBSD project permission to derive and excerpt manual
pages from the standard.  A number of other smaller open source projects
have also been granted permissions for certain excerpts of the standard.

Also during 2004, IEEE and The Open Group launched a 
certification program for the POSIX 1003.1 standard, and the first
system has been certified under that program. Similarly a
new product standard was introduced into The Open Group
UNIX certification program, known as UNIX 03, with the first certified
system also occurring in 2004.

The most recent plenary meeting was in January 2005. The purpose of the
meeting was to resolve defect reports, to review new proposals for future
work, including LSB harmonization, and to put the outline work plan for
2005-2007 together.  It was agreed that a full revision of the standard needs
to be in motion by December 2006, and that any external documents to be
considered for inclusion in the revision need to be put forward to the
group by January 2006, and submitted in full by July 2006.
For further details see the minutes (Austin/239) and 
also see some roadmap slides at
http://www.opengroup.org/platform/single_unix_specification/doc.tpl?gdid=6502 .

Regular periodic  teleconferences continue to be held to review new
defect reports (aardvark).   There are approximately 550 participants
on the main mailing list, with 120 participants to the defect reporting
list. There have been 7900 messages posted to the main mailing list
since it was established in 1998.

Further information on the Austin Group can be obtained at
http://www.opengroup.org/austin/faq.html

The online version of the standard can be obtained at
http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html