Austin Group Status Update                              Austin-111 Page 1 of 1
Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group.              May 14, 2002


The ninth meeting of the joint technical working group informally known as
the Austin Group was held at The Open Group facility in Reading, UK on May
8-9 2002. The meeting had 20 attendees (nine of which via teleconference).

The goal of the meeting was to put together the scope for Technical
Corrigendum Number 1 (TC1), with a large part of the meeting reviewing
aardvark defect reports received since the publication of the approved
specifications.

It was reported that the ISO ballot had been held up administratively,
and that the document was expected to progress to the final two month
FDIS ballot (an up down ballot) on May 19 2002. ISO has requested to
publish the document as four parts, ISO 9945-1 through ISO 9945-4.

The meeting discussed the role of the Austin Group in ongoing maintenance
of the specification, and what the criteria for generating technical
corrigenda are. In parallel it was agreed that an interpretations process
should be established. An approach was also agreed for new work items,
which lists criteria that they should meet to maximize their chances of
being included in a future revision.  The Chair has an action to produce
a paper documenting the procedures for maintenance of the Austin Group
specifications.

120 aardvark defect reports were reviewed during the meeting.  It was
agreed to form a subgroup to address the Regular Expressions issues
and that this would be chaired by David Korn.   It was agreed that the
definition of the echo utility should revert to XCU5, thereby accomodating
the historical practice of BSD, and that this be a candidate change
for TC1.

An initial draft of TC1 is scheduled for May 28. The next meeting is
scheduled to be a teleconference in mid June to discuss remaining open
issues. The second draft of TC1 which will include additional items
(if any) from the aardvark that were resolved after May 28 is scheduled
for before the end of June.

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Andrew Josey
Austin Group Chair