From keld  Wed Jan 31 17:27:13 1996
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From: keld@dkuug.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen)
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 17:27:10 +0100
In-Reply-To: stephe@srw.com (Stephen Walli)
       "(SC22WG15.760) Electronic Source to Docs" (Jan 31,  5:25)
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To: stephe@srw.com (Stephen Walli), sc22wg15@dkuug.dk
Subject: Re: (SC22WG15.760) Electronic Source to Docs

Stephen Walli writes:

> I believe some of the confusion of releasing electronic source of IEEE
> documents to Denmark comes from the fact that no one within the IEEE Standards
> Office or PASC views Denmark as a tech editor of an IEEE document yet.
> (As Vice Chair of Technical Editting for PASC I don't recognise that they
> have committed to any work yet.)

I see. Anyway it is not in the capacity of Denmark that we are
asking for it, but as part of the talks we had at the IEEE meeting
in St Pete's.  I hope such subleties do not stop us making
decent work. I do see it is a WG15 action item, but I hope such 
ISO-orientation should not mess up things.
> 
> My understanding from talking to Keld at the October PASC meeting, 
> in his capacity as HoD for Denmark to WG15, is that 
> Keld has offered in good faith to give us an estimate of the work to complete
> the LIS of 9945-1:1990 and *possibly* its current amendments and determine 
> whether or not there are resources/interests in Denmark to complete some of 
> this work -- he has not yet committed to the work itself.

That is true, we have not committed to do anything. We would like
to estimate what it would take before committing. And to that 
we would like to get hold of the source of the doc. 
Ths may be an old doc, as long as the markup is the same as
currently used. We would like to investigate other ways of
doing LIS specifications, actually much along the lines that
has been discussed in IEEE with a more C-like binding, or even
using the C language spec as the specification to bind to.
I believe that the old LIS way has proven itself as not the way
forward, as the interest completely dropped. What we say is
that writing LIS specs should be easy and straightforward,
and thats why we want to work on one of the "normal" specifications.

I would have thought that IEEE procedures would allow this,
of cause we can sign a non-disclosure statement if that is
needed.


> I will investigate with the IEEE tomorrow (Weds) about the possibilities 
> of obtaining source for the documents to which I pointed in the action item
> response.  Recognise that these are documents for which (i) standards exist,
> so the IEEE Standards Office is likely to be very copyright-oriented and
> control paranoid, (ii) Denmark will never be tech editor.  (John Zolnowsky 
> has already performed a stellar job in this area.)

I still think that I could be editor of the LIS - that was
the whole intention.

> I will further investigate and confirm that current electronic source for
> the *existing* 9945-1:1990 LIS work has been delivered to Keld.  (It was my
> understanding that this *has* happened.)  I will determine whether or not
> Paul Rabin has forwarded the annotated copy of the draft from the last ballot
> circulation to Keld.   

Yes, we have got the sources for draft 3 of the old LIS.
We miss the comments that Paul Rabin has said he had, and he
also said that he had more or less the resolvement of the comments.

> However, at this point, if all of these things are done, 
> as a member of the PASC/SEC and its projects subcommittee, and as Vice Chair of 
> Tech Editting, I would like to hear from Denmark as to what it intends to do
> with respect to getting the *existing* document through ballot (for which there
> is already an IEEE PAR and an ISO work item,) before I hear about estimates
> for possible future amendments or amending the PAR and or WI.
> That is a number that can be delivered in the near term based on the above
> two points data points being sent to Denmark, and does not require electronic 
> source to amendments.

We would be happy with the old POSIX-1 - or what I had in mind was
the combined POSIX classic and POSIX realtime.

What we would like to do was to see how big the effort was
to convert a normal C binding spec to something that could be used
for other bindings. For that we need access to marked up text
to see how to convert it, and also see if we can process
the macros etc. We cannot estimate anything without having
at least a sample of what we try to accomplish.

You know that we do a lot of work on distributing ISO materials,
and we actually perform a number of trusted functions for SC22 and
some of its working groups. We are fully aware of copyright
issues and we are not putting up anything that we are not allowed to.

Regards
Keld