Subject: IEEE/XNS Status for getaddrinfo and rfc2553

From: Jim Bound <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 13:21:58 -0500

Folks,

I had a con call today with Chris Harding and Andrew Josee from the Open
Group Networking Services team.

Here is the story.

The IEEE P1003 Working Group (aka Austin Group) is the formal dejure ISO
body who will put forth the XNS 5.2+ enhancments internationally for
the networking set of APIs like they did with other POSIX APIs. In fact
the IEEE owns the copyright to getaddrinfo().  

The IEEE Austin Group is working with XNS via Andrew over the next 12 months
to update the networking set of APIs see:
http://www.opengroup.org/austin/

But XNS believes the work on the APIs should be done by the experts
working on the APIs, which is on this list.

So we can proceed to update rfc2553bis and continue to
reference the IEEE for getaddrinfo(), within some limitations (see last
paragraph). 

My hope is we wrap up the API discussion in the next two weeks on this
list and we will put out a next draft no later than mid-April.

We must stay within the bounds of networking for rfc2553bis and not
enter areas such as intra-node communications such as AF_UNIX, or begin
to specify the behavior of datatypes to getaddrinfo but treat as much as
possible the arguments and datatypes as opaque, where it is not within
our domain or list expertise.  If you want to work on the UNIX affect
and inners of UNIX system space or on the generic space for which ISO
will be concerned to ratify an ISO standard ballot then go join IEEE 1003
committee.  You must be an IEEE member to vote on this if you don't know
when it happens.

regards,
/jim

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