WG15RIN N120
							   WG15 N470


Source:	Japan
Title:	Japanese Comments on the Working Draft of Guide for
	POSIX National Profiles and National Locales
	(SC22/WG15 N461)
Status:	Japanese position

The current draft does not fully describe what contents should be
defined in a National Profile, and what base standards should be
referred to.  The following is our idea of what should be defined
in a National Profile.

1. Base standards
The base standards which should be referred by a National Profile
are classified in two categories, culture-independent standards
and culture-dependent standards.  Culture-independent standards
include POSIX standards (such as 9945-1 and 9945-2) which defines
platforms.  It can be a profile which defines particular kind of
platforms, such as POSIX.18.

Culture-dependent base standards are the standards which define
elements which depend on a specific culture, such as coded
character sets, collations, date and time formats, and so on.
This category of standards should not be restricted to
International Standards, because such cultural standards may only
be defined in national (or regional) standards.

The need for referring to national or regional standards prevents
a National Profile to be defined as an International Standardized
Profile, because an ISP can only refer International Standards or
other International Standardized Profiles.  Therefore, a National
Profile should be defined as a national or regional standard.
However, if each national standards body started to define its
own National Profile independently, it is possible to have
contradictory definitions between National Profiles.  Such
contradiction may cause difficulty to write an  internationally
portable applications and may force platforms to customize for
each country, so defining National Profiles should be
internationally coordinated.

2. National Profile contents
Based on the above discussion, a National Profile should have the
following contents:

	- References to POSIX base standards or POSIX profiles
	- Options and parameters for the referred POSIX standards
	  (if any)
	- References to culture-dependent base standards (can be
	  national standards)
	- Options and parameters for the referred culture-
	  dependent standards (if any)
	- Locale description which describes how culture-
	  dependent standards are adapted to POSIX-based
	  platforms