If you have any interest in MPE and possible enhancements to it, please read
on. This is very important.

CSY has committed funding this year for user-generated enhancement requests.
The SIG leaders have in turn committed to having the results of this year's
System Improvement Ballot (SIB) in CSY's hands by the first week of April,
after about 10 days of Internet voting. But before that vote can take place,
each SIG must submit up to 10 enhancement requests for consideration when
the SIG leaders meet in mid-March to prepare the final SIB. The SIB that
goes to a vote will have no more than 25 items. We must act rapidly in order
to get requests for MPE enhancements considered. Therefore, I've decided to
bring this issue to the HP3000-L community.

I (the new Chairperson of SIGMPE) am planning to have a vote on the Internet
around the first week in March provided we have more than 10 CHAMPIONED
enhancement requests. That's right, I said "championed". For an item to
appear on the SIGMPE ballot and have a chance at making this year's SIB,
someone (the champion) must provide a one sentence description of the
enhancement and a short paragraph explaining its purpose and value. In the
minutes below, 34 possible enhancements are listed. Some were championed at
the SIGMPE meeting and I will be contacting each person directly. However,
many potential enhancements do not yet have a champion. Please consider
these and if one sounds like something you would like to see implemented,
send me a private communication ([log in to unmask]) with your one
sentence title and paragraph description. I will include it on the SIGMPE
ballot. Feel free to add to the list any MPE enhancement you feel strongly
enough about to champion. Remember, only those enhancement requests with
champions will make it onto the SIGMPE ballot.

This is your opportunity to have your voice heard. The drop dead date for
getting championed items back to me is Saturday, February 24. If I get 10 or
fewer championed enhancements, there will be no Internet vote. I will simply
present what I have.

Thank you,
John Burke

SIGMPE met on Tuesday, 2/13, at the SIG3000 Conference, held this year at
HP's facilities in Cupertino. The minutes follow.

SIGMPE - 2/13/2001

Jeff Kell, Chairperson of SIGMPE called the semi-annual meeting to order at
1:15.

The first item of business was a proposal that had been floated previously
to merge SIGMPE and SIGSYSMAN. A very lively discussion ensued. The
arguments in favor of keeping the SIGs separate eventually won out by about
two to one when a vote was held:

While there is significant overlap, the breadth of subject matter is such
that two SIGs still make sense. With one SIG, instead of two 2-hour
meetings, we'd be faced with one 4-hour meeting, not one 2-hour meeting.

If the SIGs are merged, there is the danger of dilution of influence.

Many people expressed the view that they only went to one or the other of
the two SIGs because they believed there was a natural division. If merged,
they might be reluctant to sit through a long combined SIG meeting.

Once the vote to continue as a separate SIG was complete, the longtime
chairperson of SIGMPE, Jeff Kell announced he did not want to continue as
Chair due to other commitments. Since I (John Burke) was one of the more
vocal advocates for SIGMPE remaining as a separate SIG, I was elected to be
the new Chairperson. Stan Sieler was voted Vice-Chairperson. [Following the
meeting, I asked Jeff Kell and Donna Garverick (Chairperson of SIGSYSMAN) to
serve on the Executive Committee and each graciously accepted.]

Jeff Kell stayed on to finish running this meeting before turning over the
reins. [I want to personally thank Jeff Kell for his many years service as
SIGMPE Chairperson.]

New Items

1. [Ken Nutsford] Proposal for a new CI variable (HPJOBQ) that will give the
Q a job is running in.
2. [Donna Garverick] Make the semi-official CI variables created by
STORE/RESTORE and FTP official. In this same vein, it was suggested that CSY
should strive to provide a consistent interface with subsystems and commands
(leaving a consistent group of CI variables).
3. [ ] breakjob/resumejob specify who did it [This item has been moved to
SIGSYSMAN and combined with a request to specify on the $STDLIST of the job
who did an abortjob.]
4. [Michael Berkowitz] Proposal for a new CI variable (HPSTREAMFILE) that
would be available for a job and could be used to determine the actual name
of the STREAM file.
5. [] Proposal for a "spoolinfo" CI function similar to finfo and jinfo.
6. [Stan Sieler] New CI datatypes such as arrays.
7. [Stan Sieler] Programmatically manage memory with large
memory/applications
8. [Stan Sieler] Enhance FREAD and FWRITE to read more than 32K chunks.
9. [Ken Nutsford] Fix various places where CODE=STORE does not work.
10. [Stan Sieler] Add a disk partitioning mechanism to MPE/iX (significant
detail available).
11. [Janet Nutsford revised by Stan Sieler] When debugging screens, such as
VPLUS, common practice in the past was to direct stdlist to a fixed ldev
terminal. There is no solution in a VT environment. Stan suggested being
able to "open" an existing VT connection.
12. [Michael Berkowitz] Enhance FCOPY to recognize HFS syntax files [note
that the workaround is to use file equations].
13. [Michael Berkowitz] Allow for the creation of process-level files, etc.
14. [Stan Sieler] loosely mounted volume sets. The idea is to be able to
mount a volume set from one machine onto another without having to create
all the accounts/groups on the system volume set of the target machine and
being able to access files on this set. This could become particularly
useful with CD-ROMs and DVDs in the future.
15. [Stan Sieler, Jeff Vance] Currently, programs that require PM must
reside in an MPE group. The proposal is to remove this requirement.


OLD ITEMS (from previous SIBs)

A. SHOWOUT %-complete (a workaround available at www.bixby.org/mark/)
B. Direct "Windows"-like interface (3rd-party products do this)
C. Permanent ALLOW
D. Kill an individual PIN (ABORTPROC does this now)
E. Mirror/iX work on system volume set
F. System-wide user variables
G. CI pipes
H. Posix smoothing issues
I. DISALLOW command (also make permanent)
J. Record-level locking in KSAM (Michael Berkowitz noted this is part of the
new COBOL standard)
K. STREAM intrinsic
L. Background/foreground CI processing (note that NOHUP will be available at
some time)
M. Rename across volume sets (note copy/purge or shell mv command
workaround)
N. Rename a group
O. New parameter on SPOOLF to allow for the adjustment in the number of
copies (while printing)
P. Provide a way to map an 8-character unix-style logon to the MPE
user/account logon.
Q. Provide a means for inetd to launch deamons at user-configurable queues.
R. Optimize directory traversal for LISTF, etc.
S. Fix the Debug/iX data breakpoint bug.