Subject: N 4085-Project Editor's Report for ISO/IEC 9945

From: Sally Seitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:03:59 -0400

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 
Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces 

Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI) 

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N4085 

TITLE: 
Project Editor's Report for ISO/IEC 9945
  
DATE ASSIGNED: 
2006-07-20 
  
SOURCE: 
Project Editor (A. Josey) 
  
BACKWARD POINTER: 
  
DOCUMENT TYPE: 
Other (defined)  

PROJECT NUMBER: 

STATUS: 
This document is circulated for review and consideration.  It will be
discussed at the September 2006 SC 22 Plenary in London under agenda item
9.2.  

ACTION IDENTIFIER: 
ACT 

DUE DATE: 
N/A 

DISTRIBUTION: 
text

CROSS REFERENCE: 

DISTRIBUTION: 
def 

Sally Seitz
Program Manager
American National Standards Institute
25 West 43rd Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10036
Tel: 212 642 4918
Fax: 212 840 2298

_____________________________________end of cover sheet, beginning of
document______________________________
ISO/IEC 9945 Project Editor Status Report                   Page 1 of 1
Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group.              July 18, 2006

ISO/IEC 9945 is developed and maintained by the Austin Common Standards
Revision Group (CSRG), a joint technical working group that brings
together the technical experts from ISO JTC1, IEEE and The Open Group.

The group met at the Standards Council of Canada, Ottawa, ON, on February
21-24 2006 to consider the goals and plan the precise milestones for
the next revision of the standard.  It was decided to commence a full
revision of ISO/IEC 9945 Parts 1-4 with the goal of producing a new
standard in 2008.

A project plan detailing the timeline and draft contents, together with
the proposed ballot cycle is available at
http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_284.html

The draft timeline for the document (from the Austin Group) 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 estimated as April 2008 

The first and second drafts of the revision are anticipated to be produced
during 2006.  The first draft will fold in changes only to existing
material, and no new submissions. The second draft will include the new
submissions and be the first feature complete draft. Its anticipated that
this will go for a three month review, including IEEE and ISO ballots. A
plenary meeting would 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 project editor has initiated formation of an ISO Editing Group
for this revision project.  The request and terms of reference were
forwarded to the SC22 secretariat in April 2006.  A call for volunteers
is currently open in SC 22. The group will share membership with the
Austin Group and SC 22 POSIX Advisory Group.  Administrative support of
the group will be shared with the Austin Group.

At present, the editing group includes:
Andrew Josey (Project editor): UK
Members from the US, CA, & NO national bodies.

A scope for the revision has been developed and is
available at http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_296r1.pdf
The scope has been set as follows:

- The revision will include new work items for additions to the
specification, to reflect current practice and knowledge, as proposed by
the IEEE, The Open Group or ISO SC22 by July 31st 2006. 

- The revision will review 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/.

- The revision will address issues arising from ISO TR 24715:2006,
"Conflicts between POSIX and the LSB".

- The revision will review features, marked Legacy or obsolescent in
the Base documents, and consider them for withdrawal. 

- The revision will consider the options within the standard, and
whether its possible to reduce the number of them. 

-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 

- Changes to the standard will be made to make it self-consistent with
any new material merged.

As part of the project paperwork for commencing this revision within
IEEE, a JTC1 Business Case Pro Forma has been generated, the relevant
extract is included below:
(see http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_299r1.txt for the
full IEEE criteria document)

---

		       PASC PMC Procedures
            Appendix B - JTC1 Business Case Pro Forma
		 (Extracted from ISO JTC1 N4477)

A. Business Relevance. That which identifies market place relevance in
terms of what problem is being solved and or need being addressed.

A.1. Market Requirement. When submitting a NP, the proposer shall
identify the nature of the Market Requirement, assessing the extent to
which it is essential, desirable or merely supportive of some other
project. Indicate if this is Essential, Desirable, or Supportive.

ISO/IEC 9945 Parts 1 through 4 is an important standard in use throughout
the world, and this is a revision to keep it in use beyond Year 2008.
This is an essential market requirement. Millions of dollars of applications
are built upon this standard.

A.2 Technical Regulation. If a Regulatory requirement is deemed to exist
- e.g. for an area of public concern e.g. Information Security, Data
protection, potentially leading to regulatory/public interest action
based on the use of this voluntary international standard - the proposer
shall identify this here. Indicate if this is Essential, Desirable,
Supportive, or Not Relevant.

Not Relevant

B. Related Work. Aspects of the relationship of this NP to other areas
of standardization work shall be identified in this section. Each of the
three subcriteria should indicate whether the work is being performed
for the identified purpose, Yes or No.

B.1 Competition/Maintenance. If this NP is concerned with completing or
maintaining existing standards, those concerned shall be identified
here.

Yes this is maintenance of ISO/IEC 9945 Parts 1 through 4.

B.2 External Commitment. Groups, bodies, or fora external to JTC1 to
which a commitment has been made by JTC for cooperation and or
collaboration on this NP shall be identified here.

IEEE PASC
The Open Group

B.3 External Std/Specification. If other activities creating standards
or specifications in this topic area are known to exist or be planned,
and which might be available to JTC1 as PAS, they shall be identified
here.

None.

C. Technical Status. The proposer shall indicate here an assessment of
the extent to which the proposed standard is supported by current
technology. For each of the three possible statuses, the technology of
the proposed NP should be rated Yes or No.

C.1 Mature Technology. Indicate here the extent to which the technology
is reasonably stable and ripe for standardization.

Yes

C.2 Prospective Technology. If the NP is anticipatory in nature based on
expected or forecasted need, this shall be indicated here.

No, it is a revision based on real need.

C.3 Models/Tools. If the NP relates to the creation of supportive
reference models or tools, this shall be indicated here.

No.

D. Any other aspects of background information justifying this NP shall
be indicated here. 

This is a joint project between The Open Group, IEEE PASC 
and ISO SC22.