POSIX Revision Project:
Austin Group Status Update

Andrew Josey, Austin Group Chair

This is a brief status update after completion of Draft 2 of the Austin Group specifications — the joint project to revise the POSIX and Single UNIX Specifications.

Draft 2 was made available on October 29, completing almost four staff months of editorial work since the Montreal meeting in July. The page count for Draft 2 now totals 2,740. The Draft 2 specifications are available from the Austin Group Web site, <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/login.html>. This draft has attempted to resolve many of the style issues raised against Draft 1, and I am pleased to report that recent discussions with the editorial team at IEEE and ISO have indicated that the manual-page format, long a significant issue, is acceptable. This should be a major benefit for the end reader of the standard.

I am currently assessing the schedule for the next meeting of the Austin Group. This would be a project-planning meeting and could possibly be done by a series of teleconferences.

The next draft will be available on February 29, 2000, and now is expected to contain merged text from XNS 5v2 (sockets), POSIX.1a (symbolic links and other minor interfaces), POSIX.1d (advanced realtime) and POSIX.2b (symbolic links for utilities and miscellaneous fixes to the utilities). We are monitoring the various POSIX projects to see when other amendments will be available for merging. The output of the recent Portable Applications Standards Committee (PASC) meeting appears to impact the schedule in that the first IEEE ballot should probably be delayed until Draft 4. Editing for Draft 3 will commence in early December. I expect to circulate a revised schedule in the next couple of weeks, and this will be available on the Austin Group Web site.

The next formal review meeting will be in May 2000 to review comments arising from Draft 3. This meeting will be a five-day meeting and will be held in either Cupertino or Copenhagen.