Subject: N 4086-Austin Group Liaison Report to the September 2006 SC 22 Pl enary

From: Sally Seitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:04:08 -0400

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

Secretariat:  U.S.A.  (ANSI) 

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N4086 

TITLE: 
Austin Group Liaison Report to the September 2006 SC 22 Plenary
  
DATE ASSIGNED: 
2006-07-20 
  
SOURCE: 
Liaison Representative (A. Josey) 
  
BACKWARD POINTER: 
  
DOCUMENT TYPE: 
Liaison Organization Contribution  

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
7.2.2.  

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_______________________________________

Austin Group Status Report                             Austin-306 Page 1 of
1
Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group.              July 19, 2006

The Austin Common Standards Revision Group (CSRG) is a joint technical
working group established to develop and maintain the core open systems
interfaces that are the POSIX(R) 1003.1 (and former 1003.2) standards,
ISO/IEC 9945 parts 1 to 4, and the core of the Single UNIX Specification,
Version 3.

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.

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 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 first and second drafts of the revision will be produced
during 2006.  The first draft was made available on June 30 2006 and
includes changes only to existing material, and no new submissions. 
A Project Authorization Request has been submitted to IEEE which will be
considered at the September 2006 NESCOM meeting. Within ISO, a request to
form an Editing Group has been initiated. A plenary meeting of
The Austin Group is scheduled for September 12-15 to review draft
one comments.

The second draft will include the new submissions (four API sets
being submitted by The Open Group)  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 will be held to
resolve the bug reports on Draft 2 in February 2007.

Draft three will 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 approvals
by September 2008.

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.

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).

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