Changes to the P1003 D4 Draft Proposed Standard

[Moderator, John Quarterman]

This is the first of a series of articles about changes which were made
to the P1003 D4 proposed draft standard at the D.C. meeting.  This one
contains a few general comments.

All these comments are my opinion, and not the official position of
IEEE, P1003, or anyone else.  While I think I understand the things I'm
writing about here, I've only been to two committee meetings.  I trust
that other, more experienced members will correct me if I stray too far
from the consensus.


Many people have the impression that the P1003 standard will be almost
exclusively based on System V.  This is not really true.  The draft
standard is probably closer to System V than to any other variant of
UNIX, and the System V Interface Description is a constant reference at
committee meetings.  However, committee members often express concern
about not outlawing features of hosted systems (emulations on top of
other operating systems), networked systems, or distributed systems.
(The standard does not explicitly address most of these issues, it just
carefully does not make them impossible or hard to do.)  Also, many of
the committee members run non-System V-based software on their own
systems at work.  4.2BSD features, in particular, are frequently
mentioned.

Thus, while some System V-specific features like FIFOs appear in
the standard, the mechanisms provided for reading directories
are the 4.2BSD opendir/readdir/closedir functions, and the data
interchange format is tar, not cpio.

Another major concern of the P1003 committee is compatibility with
the X3J11 C standard.  This led to major modifications to P1003.D4.

An issue which has not been addressed thus far to any great extent
is internationalization.  There is no mention of character sets
other than ASCII, for instance.

And another issue which is explicitly not addressed is binary
compatibility:  the standard is intended to facilitate the writing
of programs whose *source* may then be moved from one conforming
implementation to another with minimal changes.

While the P1003 committee wishes to produce a standard which
is inclusive enough to be of use, it is necessary to start with
a small trial use standard and include other issues in later drafts.


In the specific comments on P1003 D4, note that I identify things
by draft number and section number, not page number.  This is necessary,
due to the many printed forms of the draft.  Please do the same in
any comments you submit to the committee or to the newsgroup.

Volume-Number: Volume 2, Number 13