Austin Group Status Report Austin-320 Page 1 of 1 Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group. September 18, 2006 The Austin Common Standards Revision Group (CSRG) is a joint technical working group that manages the joint specification that is ISO/IEC 9945 (POSIX), IEEE Std 1003.1 and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6. The current activities are maintenance of the current approved standard and production of a full revision to the standard. The goal of the full revision is to produce a new approved standard in 2008. The group met at the Open Group offices in Reading UK, on September 12-15 2006 to consider the feature content and options organization for the next revision of the standard. Deliverables from the plenary meeting include detailed editing instructions for the merger of new materials and reorganization of the options of the standard (Austin/317), together with an updated project plan (Austin/319) detailing the timeline and draft contents and the proposed ballot cycle. The Base documents input to the revision activity are finalized to be as follows: IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition (identical to ISO/IEC 9945:2003 plus TC1, and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, 2004 edition) ISO/IEC 9899:1999 Programming Languages -- C (including TC1 and TC2) The Open Group Extended API Sets Parts 1 through 4 The long scope document drafted in February was submitted to IEEE as the Project Authorization Request (PAR) for the revision and approved on September 15 2006 (see Austin/285r2). Within ISO, a request to form an Editing Group has been initiated. The draft timeline for the document shows drafts available as follows: June 30 2006 Oct 31 2006 May 15 2007 Aug 1 2007 Dec 15th 2007 Mar 1 2008 With technical completion (prior to final approval) estimated as April 2008. The scope of the revision includes the following: 1. The addition of new functionality from The Open Group Extended API Sets Parts 1 through 4 The September 2006 meeting decided to adopt the majority of the functions from these API sets into the Base. See Austin/317 for details. 2. Issues raised by ISO TR 24715:2006, "Conflicts between POSIX and the LSB". 3. A review of the use of fixed path filenames within the standard, for example the at, batch and crontab utilities that presently have a requirement for use of the directory /usr/lib/cron. The proposed change in XCUbug2.txt ERN95 is to remove the requirement for fixed named paths and make them implementation-defined. 4. A review of features marked as Legacy or obsolescent in the Base documents and consider the status of such items. The default for draft 2 will be to remove features marked Legacy and Obsolescent in the 2004 edition, with the exception of the futimes() function. 5. A review of existing interfaces to decide whether any of them should be marked obsolescent. This is a way to transition features to allow a future withdrawal. The September 2006 meeting decided to obsolete the following: - the Batch Environment Services and Utilities option from XCU (BE) - the POSIX tracing option in XSH (TRC and suboptions) - X/Open STREAMS (XSR) A number of other interfaces have been selected for obsolete status (see Austin/317 for details): _setjmp, _longjmp _tolower, _toupper ftw getitimer isascii setpgrp siginterrupt tempnam ulimit 6. Issues raised by Defect Reports as recorded in the Austin Group Aardvark reports and SD/5 (technical issues log) by June 2007 will be addressed in the revision 7. A review of the options within the standard, and whether its possible to reduce the number of them. Such a move of functionality from an option into the Base would need to include an update to the subprofiling considerations appendix to record the grouping by name and the list of associated functions. It was agreed at the September 2006 meeting that the following options would migrate to Base (See Austin/317 for details): AIO, MF, MPR, SEM, THR, TSF The plan with the project timeline is available as Austin/319. This anticipates that there will be either five or six drafts. The second draft is anticipated to be produced on October 31 2006, will include the new submissions and be the first feature complete draft. This will go for a three month review, including IEEE and ISO ballots. A plenary meeting will be held to resolve the bug reports in February 2007. Draft three would be the first draft on which the narrowing down rules will be applied and subsequent drafts will then aim to take the document through to completion of the relevant approval ballots in the sponsoring bodies. It is anticipated that the next revision will complete by September 2008. The group continues to meet regularly by teleconference to consider defect reports and issues. See the Austin Group home page at http://www.opengroup.org/austin/ for the events diary (a Google Calendar exists to which you can subscribe). An open IRC channel is also available at irc://irc.freestandards.org #austin Further information on the Austin Group can be obtained at http://www.opengroup.org/austin/faq.html The current draft of the revision can be obtained at: http://www.opengroup.org/austin/login.html (a login id and password is required) The online version of the current standard can be obtained at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html ----- Notes: (i) Numbered documents and Standing Documents can be obtained from the Austin Group Document register at http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docreg.html