Convenor:

Nick Stoughton has resigned as convenor of IST/5/-/15, since he is now resident in the United States. In the absence of any other volunteers, Lois Goldthwaite has agreed to serve as the "stuckee", as one member described the post. IN other news, she has also been appointed liaison from WG21 to WG15.

Membership:

Currently there are 15 members on the IST/5/-/15 reflector. Most activity takes place through email discussion.

International events:

WG15 is one of three groups participating in the a joint technical working group (called the Austin Group) to revise and consolidate the Posix standard (ISO 9945). The other two are The Open Group and IEEE. Both of the latter groups have already approved (in September and December respectively) and published the document, but ISO administrative procedures have resulted in many delays on the third front.

One cause of delay is that ISO have requested the document be published in four parts, with separate part numbers. It is considered extremely unfortunate that ISO cannot manage to publish this standard as a single part without editorial change. The Austin Group has accepted their proposal to publish as four parts, with the proviso that it should be distributed on a single CD and sold as a single standard. It is important to note that the standard is the whole document, and no quarter stands alone in any respect.

The two-month ISO FDIS ballot has been expected to start any day now for the past three months. Can BSI or one of our parent committees apply any pressure to move this forward?

An HTML version of the standard is available free on-line at http://www.UNIX-systems.org/version3/. The cheapest way to purchase it is with the Single Unix Specification Guide Book from The Open Group, which comes with the HTML and PDF standard on CD-ROM (for GBP 36).

The Austin Group was established to be the joint development body and maintenance organization for the revised 1003.1-2001 specification. Now that the standard has been approved it is important to establish a period of stability, with active maintenance of the document as issues are discovered.  Maintenance would be through handling interpretation requests and publishing Technical Corrigenda or Interpretations when appropriate.

A face-to-face and teleconference meeting was held at The Open Group facility in Reading, UK on May 8-9 2002, to process defect reports and determine the scope of the first Technical Corrigendum for the standard. The next meeting is scheduled to be a teleconference June 20 to discuss the first draft of TC1 and remaining open issues. A second draft of TC1 is scheduled for before the end of June.

Based on past performance we should expect the next revision to commence in about 2005 with output expected in 2007.

Respectfully submitted,
Lois Goldthwaite
Convenor, IST/5/-/15 -- Posix