JTC1/SC22/WG14 N930

                                          ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 N930
					                   2000-11-22

Title: report on SC22/WG15 - POSIX activities
Source: Keld Simonsen - liaison to WG15

The main activity in WG15 - POSIX is the revision of the POSIX .1
and .2 standards. This is done in the socalled Austin group, a collaboration
between IEEE PASC, The Open Group and WG15. They work and meet in a way much
similar to WG14 and J11. and the plan is to produce a common document,
identical for publication in the three groups. 

The base of this joint document is the Single Unix Specification from
the Open Group. This means that all the TOG extensions to the ISO/IEEE
standards will now be part of the full standard, as an option. 
Beyond what is included in the POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 standards, a rationale
and a networks extensions volume is also included. All of the volumes
will be gathered in one standard to be published at the same time.

This also means that the APIs from the C standard will be included ad verbatim.
(The C language definition, however, will not be included ad verbatim, only by
normative reference). Questions on maintenance is resolved by deferring to 
the C standard.

Much effort has been to align the new POSIX standard with C99. This
also includes alignment with resolutions to defect reports on C99, 
and this work is in progress. I foresee more cooperation work on this in
the future.

The Austin group has met physically about 5 times and also had a couple
of teleconferences. Each meeting has resolved around 1000 comments,
so the work load is quite big. The resulting document is about 3500 pages
at this time.

The draft 4 is out for FCD ballot in SC22 at this time, as document SC22 N3161
http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/open/n3161/ . The ballot ends 2000-12-30.

The WG15 group has also dealt with the conflicts between the POSIX and the C locale,
and this is resolved now.