Opinions on prospective standards sought

[Peter Collinson]

Submitted-by: pc at hillside.co.uk (Peter Collinson)


The IEEE POSIX meeting last week had one great topic, or in fact, two,
depending on your point of view.

OSF had sent in a request to be allowed to create a standard based on
Motif.  The request is technically called a PAR - a Project
Authorization Request.  Not to be outdone and with great regret, Sun
sent in a PAR for a standard based on OpenLook.

Both of these requests were interesting in that the standard was to be
created by `direct ballot' (no acronym as yet :-)). This means that a
working group will not come into existence to discuss the ins and outs
of the technical content. Someone will create a `standards document'
from existing documentation and this new document will form the basis
of the standard. The draft document then enters the normal balloting
process.

The final decision of the SEC (Sponsor Executive Committee), the body
charged with making a decision about the PARs, was effectively to say:
at this time, we will not go ahead with accepting the proposals as
POSIX projects.

If this resume is wrong, I would be grateful for correction.

The purpose of this article is to raise this issue in a general forum,
there are a great number of questions here. There are many possible
positions that can be taken. I don't want to be seen to prejudge the
issue by asking too many questions.. so perhaps the topic for debate
should be

	Was the decision of the SEC wrong?

Peter Collinson
Usenix Standards Representative

[ Peter told me he was tempted to post this to ieee.org as well, and I was
tempted to place followup's there.  However, as long as any discussion this
generates relates mostly to how it will affect unix standards, I will keep
it here. -- mod ]

Volume-Number: Volume 23, Number 37