Proposals for revision of POSIX 2

	In the current work with the revision of the ISO 9945-2 standard,
	some proposals in the following should be considered.

	In the present version of ISO9945-2 some important utilities
	is not included.  Annex E, page 858ff of the standard specify the
	UNIX-utilities, which for various reasons is not included.

	Generally, the standard is based on UNIX, but utilities known
	from other operating systems could also be considered if they
	are: 1) widely used and accepted and/or 2) utilities from UNIX
	does not fulfill the demands.

	Some examples of theese kind of utilities is compression,
	editors and versioning.

	Speaking of compression, only "pack/unpack" or "compress/
	uncompress" apparently was considered in the selection.
	However programs from other operating systems is heavily
	used and widely accepted, e.g. "zip", "lharc", "arj" and "gzip"
	just to mention some few examples.  If the UNIX utilities is
	lacking functionality, it would be a good idea to look after
	alternatives known from other operating systems.

	Speaking of screen-oriented editors the standard specifies "vi"
	and no other alternatives ...
	The "vi" editor has a different look & feel compared with almost
	any other editors (and wordproccesing programs for that matter)
	and furthermore it is certainly not popular between non-UNIX
	users.
	For that reason, "vi" is not appropriate as the only one screen-
	editor alone in the standard.  This can involve a certain risk to
	obstruct the general acceptance of the standard, so another editor
	also should be considered, e.g. "pico", "joe" and "raw".

	The lack of utilities for version control in the standard accounts
	for other problems.  The emerging use of client/server and systems
	management in distributed environments need effective versioning
	of the version identification unambiguous.
	It would also be nice if the revised standard specifies utilities
	around version control, but if neccesary this could be postphoned.

	The final proposal here is that the utilities or commands specified
	in ISO 9945-2 should be gathered in their own dedicated directory.
	In that way the user via her search-path can assure, that only the
	standard commands are used.

	Regards Torben Budtz
		tb@kmd-ac.dk