L2/00-382

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Single Unix Specification Liaison Report
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Sandra Martin O'Donnell
November 1, 2000



The Austin Group is sponsored by The Open Group and is creating the
newest draft of the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). If you are familiar
with the X/Open Portability Guide, the SUS is derived from that
document. It incorporates efforts from the ANSI/ISO C standard as
well as the POSIX documents.

The current version of SUS is in its fifth round of review. The entire
document had about 2500 pages earlier in the review process, but now has
ballooned to 3500 pages.

Change proposals are discussed on two mailing lists. They are:

austin-group@opengroup.org   (for general discussions)
austin-review@opengroup.org  (for filing change requests)

See http://www.opengroup.org/austin/lists.html for information on
subscribing.
Subscription is open to all.

There have been many i18n-and-Unicode-related discussions over the six
months I've been subscribing. What has been worrisome to me, however, is
the lack of i18n expertise among the list subscribers. Some people filing
change requests have said they have never used internationalized features,
but they still believe the functionality should be removed or radically
changed.

Among the proposals have been:

1.  To remove internationalized regular expression behavior because users
"will delete the wrong files." A Red Hat representative said if this
proposal were rejected, he would have to ignore the standard and not
implement the behavior because of the problems it would cause for users.
For example, in non-C/POSIX locales, "rm [a-c]*" might delete files
starting with uppercase A, B, or C.
2.  To deprecate regular expressions except in the POSIX locale.
3.  To change ALL instances of the word "character" throughout the
document to "wide character" (rationale: "to match with ISO C definition
of the word `character'").
4.  To describe regular expression behavior outside the POSIX locale as
being "unspecified."

Proposals 1-3 listed here have been rejected (I've been filing many
objections :-) ), but #4 is moving forward.

In addition to the proposals about general i18n functionality, there have
been long threads about using Unicode within the SUS. One poster claimed
The Open Group needed to "formally notify" the Unicode Technical Committee
because it is "impossible" to conform to SUS and also use Unicode. The
fact that many companies are doing so has not convinced him that he's
wrong. There also is a lot of incorrect information about Unicode forms,
and how each can be used within POSIX-like implementations.

Of course, not everyone on the UTC is interested in the SUS, but many
companies represented do have significant Unix implementations and market
presence. But I am concerned that i18n support throughout the SUS is being
marginalized or decommitted because most active participants in the Austin
Group are not familiar with the functionality and the history of decisions.
Keld Simonsen, Kent Karlsson, and I are among the few people on the list
who have significant i18n experience.

I would like to see other i18n experts join the austin-group list and
participate in the discussions. Otherwise, I am concerned that the final
version of the standard will be something our companies do not want to
support.

          -- Sandra
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Sandra Martin O'Donnell
Compaq Computer Corporation
sandra.odonnell@compaq.com
odonnell@zk3.dec.com