Some people earlier suggested a SIGPosix (or at least BOFPosix), and I'm
intrigued at least to the interest level in the user community.  I would be
willing to help organize something along these lines although I can't make a
commitment to "lead" since I have other SIG obligations.
 
There is at least a small group of people who are Posix "activists" (myself
included), and with some participation from Mark Klein (Gnu); Dan Hollis,
Randy Medd, Bruce Toback (FreeVT3K); and whomever else wishes to jump on the
bandwagon we can co-ordinate our efforts now that CSY has taken a
reactive/passive/maintenance stand.  As previous discussion addressed, many
people are either totally disinterested in Posix under MPE, or frustrated by
the "non-Unix features" of Posix.  To some extent you could categorize these
groups as the "MPE zealots wanting nothing to do with unix" and the "Unix
zealots wanting nothing to do with MPE".
 
I think the best opportunity for all parties is to devise an MPE-mindset
package of the ":restore, stream install, and go" variety which plugs in the
missing links in the posix implementation and installs the Gnu environment
and other necessary pieces of the currently available (but widely unknown)
capabilities.  The current status quo is disorganized and very confusing to
all concerned, but with 5.5 plus available freeware, you can have a free
and reasonably robust development environment (if you want it); or at the
least the necessary "environment" that the ports expect to find.  Few of the
ports are "standalone" - they expect to find BSD libraries, Gnu utilities,
and/or ship with redundant static libraries.  This must change.
 
If we can "stabilize" a common development environment, the willing
developers can share a common ground and porting should be eased
considerably.  With enough ports (and MPE-friendly packaging) we can
hopefully bring useful posix software to the hands of the most astute MPE
purist.
 
Who knows... Gnu MPE/iX?  If source code was released under Gnu copyleft
provisions I'm sure we'd see some advances of the 3000.  But that's
daydreaming.  Let's get together and see what we can do with reality.
 
Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>