Minutes of the 1st September 2016 Teleconference Austin-781 Page 1 of 1 Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group. 2nd September 2016 Attendees: Don Cragun, IEEE PASC OR Geoff Clare, The Open Group Mark Ziegast, SHware Systems Nick Stoughton, USENIX, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22 OR Eric Blake, Red Hat Richard Hansen, Google Joerg Schilling, FOKUS Fraunhofer Apologies Martin Rehak, Oracle Andrew Josey, The Open Group David Clissold, IBM * General news Andrew has held a call with IEEE whose position is they do not want to publish a rolled up edition. It looks as if The Open Group will publish its own version and Andrew is waiting to hear back from IEEE about the frontmatter for that. * Outstanding actions ( Please note that this section has been flushed to shorten the minutes - to locate the previous set of outstanding actions, look to the minutes from 28 Jan 2016) Bug 0000249: Add standard support for $'...' in shell Reopened http://austingroupbugs.net/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=249 We will return to bug 249 on a future call. Bug 0000953: Alias expansion is under-specified Was Accepted as Marked http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=953 Richard has an action to propose new wording to discuss in a future telecon. * Current Business Bug 983: awk's rand()/srand() spec not useful Accepted as Marked. http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=983 This item is tagged for TC3-2008. The interpretation was revised. Andrew has an action to propose the interpretation (completed after the meeting) Interpretation response: The standard does not speak to this issue, and as such no conformance distinction can be made between alternative implementations based on this. This is being referred to the sponsor. Rationale: The behavior in this area varies between various implementation of awk. Notes to the Editor (not part of this interpretation): Replace the description of rand() in the awk EXTENDED DESCRIPTION on P2467 L79046 with: Return a floating point pseudo-random number n, such that 0<=n<1. Replace the description of srand() in the awk EXTENDED DESCRIPTION on P2467, L79047-79078 with: Set the seed value for rand to expr or use the seconds since the Epoch if expr is omitted. The previous seed value shall be returned. The behavior is unspecified if expr is not an integer expression or if the value of expr is not within the range 0 through 2^31-1 (2147483647), inclusive. The initial seed value is unspecified if rand is called without calling srand first. The srand function uses the argument as a seed for a new sequence of pseudo-random numbers to be returned by subsequent calls to rand. If srand is then called with the same seed value, the sequence of pseudo-random numbers shall be repeated. On page 2486 line 79914, replace the awk FUTURE DIRECTIONS with: A future version of this standard may require srand to accept any numeric value and calculate the seed by taking the provided value, converting it to an integer, and calculating the integer value modulo 2^n where n is an implementation-defined value greater than or equal to 32. A future version of this standard may require the initial seed for the rand function (the seed value used if srand is not called) to be an integer between 0 and 2^n-1 inclusive where n is an implementation-defined value greater than or equal to 32. Additionally, the initial seed value may be required to be a (pseudo-)random value such that two invocations of awk are unlikely to emit the same sequence of random values (unless the seed is explicitly set to the same value via srand). A future version of this standard may define a new posix_srand function that enables application authors to set the seed to a (pseudo-)random value generated by the system. Alternatively, the specification of the srand function may be altered to provide some means to set the default seed value to a (pseudo-)random value. Next Steps ---------- The next call is on September 8th, 2016 (a Thursday) Andrew will bring up the bridge. Calls are anchored on US time. (8am Pacific) This call will be for the regular 90 minutes. http://austingroupbugs.net An IRC channel will be available for the meeting irc://irc.freenode.net/austingroupbugs An etherpad is usually up for the meeting, with a URL using the date format as below: http://posix@posix.rhansen.org:9001/p/201x-mm-dd password=2115756#