WG15 TAG N494 October 21, 1994 U.S. Action Item Report 9405-03 United States: 1) Consider the LIS and language-binding interface changes necessary to handle character-oriented features as a symbol and not storage patterns for a future revision of 9945-1. 2) form SC22/WG15 of any plans for supporting such features in future revisions of all parts of the 9945 standard (resolution 226, open action items 9210-71, 9305-24, 9310-10) Status: CLOSED...Character interfaces defined in ISO/IEC 9945-1 use containers for representations of character strings, with size in bytes, since this is existing behaviour. These interfaces support multi-byte character encodings (with some restrictions), as defined in the C standard. Support for abstract characters is being considered in the 9945-1 LIS. There are no plans to add support for abstract characters in the C binding for 9945-1 or in the C-Language Bindings Option (Annex B) in 9945-2. 9405-04 United States: Consider the United Kingdom contribution on a proposed new rigorously conforming conformance class (open action items 9210-77, 9305-26, 9210-13). Status: CLOSED...The US agrees with the need for a conformance definition similar to that named "rigorously-conforming POSIX.1 C application" in WG15 N374, and will incorporate this into a future amendment to, or revision of, of ISO/IEC 9945-1. The US agrees that it would be beneficial to increase harmonization of conformance definitions in 9945-1 and 9945-2, and will address this in the next revision of these standards. 9405-05 United States: Supply a copy of the latest draft of 1003.2b to WG15 for review and comment (open action item 9305-31, 9310-15) Status: CLOSED...Draft 10 is being forwarded to WG15 and SC22 for review and comment (copies will also be made available at the Oct/94 WG15 mailing. The IEEE ballot of Draft 10 of 1003.2b closed 8/1/94. 9405-06 United States: Investigate making electronic copies of draft documents available to WG15 (open action item 9305-33, 9310-16) Status: CLOSING...Final IEEE approval has not yet been received, but preliminary information is that IEEE will allow copies of draft documents to be made available in electronic form. The U.S. will announce via the WG15 e-mail reflector as soon as materials are available. 9405-07 United States: To provide a plan for incorporating into 9945-1 the additional rational regarding the use of the terms byte and character as referenced in WG15 N349 (open action item 9305-40, 9310-18) Status: CLOSED...ISO/IEC 9945-1 is careful in distinguishing between uses of "byte" and "character", based on existing implementations. Defect reports concerning these terms will be given full consideration. A definition of "byte" and rationale for the use of the terms "byte" and "character" will be added in a future revision of 9945-1 (IEEE 1003.1a). 9405-14 United States: Review the scope of WG15 POSIX security related items and position this work relative to the proposed program of work and terms of reference of SC21, SC18 and their working groups. United States member body will identify any areas of overlap and report their findings back to WG15 (open action item Paris-01, 9310-25) Status: OPEN...Work on this item has been initiated in POSIX.6. The U.S. expects this material will be available before the next WG15 meeting and will provide it as soon as it is available. 9405-15 Member bodies: Member bodies to contribute national profiles that they have developed to RIN and WG20 (open action item Paris-07, 9310-26) Status: CLOSED...The U.S. reported in October, 1993 that it does not have a contribution. 9405-18 United States and New Zealand: Identify the basis for partitioning of functionality contained in language bindings (open action item 9310-30) Status: CLOSED...9945-1 LIS groups the specifications of features based on the underlying objects, but does not specify partition for packaging. Language bindings are permitted to specify partitions for packaging as appropriate for the language, as long as the mapping to LIS features is clear. 9405-19 Member bodies: Identify participants in the 9945-1 and 9945-2 interpretations process. Representatives should be identified to the Convenor via eMail as soon as possible (open action item 9310-37). Status: CLOSED...US reported COMPLETE to May 1995 meeting. 9405-23 Member bodies: Comment to WG15 RIN draft position on ISO 10646 impact on POSIX standards (open action item 9310-47). Status: OPEN...The RIN report has not yet been received as a WG15 document. Therefore, it could not be reviewed. 9405-24 United States: Report back on option annex status and development for relevant POSIX specifications (open action item 9310-48). Status: CLOSED...9945-1 and 9945-2 already contain the "option annex" information. This information will be amended as appropriate as the standars are amended. 9405-29 Member bodies: Review and comment on the project management format contained in N486. Status: CLOSED...John Hill presented a report on this at the Tokyo meeting of WG15 in May, 1995. 9405-32 United States: Query PASC on WG15 issue list item 3 and report back to WG15 on the status of this issue.. Status: CLOSED...This issue will be addressed by the .2b amendment to 9945-2 which is currently under development. 9405-35 United States: Report on the status of issues raised in N459 at the Oct/94 meeting Status: CLOSED...U.S. will provide a report at the Oct/94 meeting. 9405-42 Member bodies: Determine the feasibility of working with CEN as documented in N444 for the registry of POSIX national profiles, locales and charmaps for discussion at the Oct/94 meeting. Status: CLOSED...The U.S. has reviewed N444 and is prepared to discuss it at the Oct/94 meeting. In general, the US supports development of a standard for a POSIX Cultural Elements Registry. However, we believe some of the technical details of the proposal to be inappropriate. The character set specified in Section 6.7 should be the POSIX portable character set. Additional US technical comments are included in the US response to SC22/WG15 action item 9405-56. 9405-44 Member bodies: Provide detailed proposals for the Oct/94 meeting on how the work on the guide for National Profiles and Locales is to be structured and completed. Status: CLOSED...We have no objection to the production of the Guide for POSIX National Profiles and National Locales. This is a guide on "how" to produce a POSIX National Profile. Although this is related to work done in the POSIX.2 working group, POSIX.2 does not have the resources to produce this document. The U.S. recommends the following alternative production processes (in order of decreasing preference): 1) developed by a PASC Working Group (Japan submit a Project AuthorizationRequest (PAR) to IEEE to create working group); 2) developed by Japan and submitted through the IEEE process; 3) developed by Japan and submitted through the ISO process; and 4) developed in SC22/WG15. 9405-52 United States: Review N416 and N420 and forward them to PASC for consideration. Status: CLOSED...re N416...POSIX.2b does not plan to include the suggested changes. The proposal provides separate sets of "tri-graphs" for each of the languages specified in POSIX.2. The sets of tri-graphs vary from language to language making it difficult for users to remember which tri-graphs mean what. The proposed sets of tri-graphs do not reflect historic practice. Some of these sets of tri-graphs introduce ambiguities into the language. Some of these sets of tri-graphs have not been completed. POSIX.2 has attempted to reflect historic practice and make the implementation of these utilities more consistent with one another, so that users will have less difficulty learning to use the standard utilities. The proposed changes would be useful to a very small subset of the intended audiance of the standard and would make it much more difficult for all users to write portable scripts. re N420...The languages specified by POSIX.2 specify behavior when identifier names are chosen from the portable character set. We have not found anything to preclude an implementation from recognizing extended characters as part of an identifier. However, an application making use of these extensions would be non-portable. 9405-54 United States: Review SC22 N1566 and JTC1 N2890 and report back to WG15 if there are any issues. Status: CLOSED...The U.S. has no issues to report. 9405-55 United States: Forward N462 to PASC for possible inclusion in 1003.2b and report back to WG15 on actions taken; reference WG15 resolution 94-282. Status: CLOSED...The US believes the proposal is not complete since it does not provide any way to transform CHARIDS files into charmap files. Therefore, there still isn't a way to create portable locale definitions. A couple of straightforward extensions to the localedef utility and the charmap files in 9945-2 will provide a portable way to define locales. We believe this is the intent of the Canadian proposal. The following list summarizes changes the US proposes as an alternative solution to this problem: 1. Expand the legal values for the rhs of the charmap file to include UCS2 and UCS4 values. These values would be of the form and , respectively. 2. Add a -u option to localedef to indicate the target code set to be used by the compiled locale. If the -u option is given then all values of the forms and will be translated from those UCS2 and UCS4 values to corresponding code points in the code set specified by the -u option. 3. That implementations have localedef predefine mappings for the standard symbolic names for characters in the character set defined by 9945-2 Section 2.4. The US believes that these changes would allow application writers to build portable charmap and locale source definition files that could be used on any implementation providing the 9945-2 option that includes the localedef utility as long as the implementation recognized the target code set for the compiled locale. The US intends to flesh out this proposal for inclusion in the next distributed draft for IEEE ballot of P1003.2b. The proposal was not received by the US in time for distribution to SC22/WG15 in draft 10. If you have any comments, the US would appreciate receiving them in time for discussion at our January IEEE PASC meetings. 9405-56 United States: Forward N444 to PASC for possible inclusion 1003.2b and report back to WG15 on actions taken; reference WG15 resolution 94-283. Status: CLOSED...The US has identified two proposals for change to 9945-2 presented in N444. The first of these is the Charsymbmap proposal described in section 6.9. We beleive this proposal to be essentially the same as the Canadian CHARIDS proposal contained in N462. See the response to action item 9405-55. The second porposal is the "replace-after" proposal descibed in Annex A. The US believes this extension to be unnecessary as demonstrated in Annex A.4 of the same document.