Minutes of the 5 Aug 2010 Teleconference Austin-491 Page 1 of 1 Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group. August 6th , 2010 Attendees Andrew Josey, The Open Group Don Cragun, PASC OR Mark Brown, IBM, TOG OR Geoff Clare, The Open Group Nick Stoughton, USENIX, ISO/IEC OR Eric Blake, Red Hat Apologies Ulrich Drepper, Red Hat * New business We picked up on the filename discussions. We looked at bug 291, filenames need not contain characters . http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=291 Mark Brown noted that in his experience that ASCII and EBCDIC systems are not expected to co-exist. It was agreed that pathnames are sequences of bytes and that the term string is defined as a byte sequence (from XBD): "A contiguous sequence of bytes terminated by and including the first null byte." After much discussion the following was proposed as a consent item: Consent item: ------------- A POSIX conforming environment can have EBCDIC or ASCII based locales, but not both. The standard way for interchange on XSI systems is the dd utility, dd conv=ebcdic and dd conv=ascii On some systems iconv can also be used, depending on which codesets it supports. It would be a bug if "locale -a" showed the availability of both EBCDIC and ASCII based locales. A system supporting both EBCDIC and ASCII environments would be expected to provide two POSIX locales, one in either codeset. --end item-- In summary the working group agreed with the basic concepts in bug 291. We agreed to leave it open, and to update it further based on todays meeting. A discussion followed on pathname and some wording was proposed: If a pathname consists of only bytes corresponding to characters from the portable filename character set and characters and a single terminating character, the pathname shall be useable as a character string; otherwise, the pathname might only be a string (rather than a character string). Don also noted a problem with the definitions of "." and ".." and will post a followup note. Next Steps ---------- The next call will be on August 12th at 16:00 UK time/08:00 Pacific and will be a session dedicated to discussing filenames. http://austingroupbugs.net See the calendar for the list of dialup numbers. An IRC channel will be available for the meeting irc://irc.freestandards.org #austin ICAL: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/nvctqtstkuni3fab9k3jqtrt4g@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic XML: http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/nvctqtstkuni3fab9k3jqtrt4g@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic