All
Enclosed are the minutes from this weeks meeting
regards
Andrew
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Minutes of the 22nd January 2026 Teleconference Austin-1477 Page 1 of 1
Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group. 24th January 2026

Attendees:
Andrew Josey,The Open Group 
Haelwenn Monnier, The Open Group
Nick Stoughton, USENIX, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22 OR (partial)
Geoff Clare, The Open Group
Eric Blake, Red Hat, The Open Group OR
Mark Brown (partial)

Apologies
Eric Ackermann, CISPA

* General business

We confirmed the calendar for upcoming meetings, the next meeting
is February 5th.

Andrew will take an action to review the IEEE ballot pool to see
if we can identify a candidate (the candidate needs to be 
a technical expert who is an IEEE member). (action still open)

We noted that the PSDO ballot at ISO ends on January 24th.


* New Business

Bug 1959: dd conv=lcase and conv=ucase should only translate single byte locales
https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1959
Accepted as marked, interp required, tc1-2024 tag

Resolution updated following comments in the bug.

AIX has documentation on their supported EBCDIC and ISO/"PC" mappings
(lossless translation I guess, while dd(1) seems lossy):
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.3.0?topic=converters-compatible-code-set-names

Action: Andrew to restart the interpretation timer (completed)

Interpretation response:
The standard states that conv=lcase and conv=ucase map characters
as specified by LC_CTYPE, and conforming implementations must conform
to this. However, concerns have been raised about this which are
being referred to the sponsor.

Rationale:
Mapping multibyte characters would cause problems for block sizes
and across block boundaries and is not current implementation
practice.

Notes to the Editor (not part of this interpretation):

On page 2778 line 91992,91996 section dd (lcase,ucase), after:
<blockquote>Characters for which no mapping is specified shall
not be modified by this conversion.</blockquote>

add a sentence:
<blockquote>If a character to be mapped or a character resulting
from the mapping is not a single-byte character, the behavior
is unspecified.</blockquote>


After page 2778 line 92010 section dd (conv=value) add a paragraph
after the list:
<blockquote>If the <b>ucase</b> or <b>lcase</b> conversion is
used together with <b>ascii</b>, <b>ebcdic</b>, or <b>ibm</b>,
the behavior is unspecified.</blockquote>



After page 2783 line 92100 section dd (APPLICATION USAGE) add:
<blockquote>Since the conversion from upper to lower or vice-versa
is unspecified if the character to be mapped or a character
resulting from the mapping is not a single-byte character, or
if converting to ASCII or EBCDIC and attempting to change case,
it is recommended to use <i>tr</i> to perform such
conversions.</blockquote>


On page 2783 line 92110 section dd (EXAMPLES), change:
<blockquote><pre>dd if=/dev/tape of=x ibs=800 cbs=80
conv=ascii,lcase</pre></blockquote>

to:
<blockquote><pre>dd if=/dev/tape ibs=800 cbs=80 conv=ascii |
LC_ALL=C tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' > x</pre>


The following command should not be used for this purpose as
its behavior is unspecified:

<pre>dd if=/dev/tape of=x ibs=800 cbs=80
conv=ascii,lcase</pre></blockquote>


After Page 2783 line 92100 (Application Usage) add a new paragraph:
<blockquote>Applications that need to convert between ASCII
(ISO/IEC 646:1991 US) and some variant of EBCDIC should check
to see if the implementation supports such conversion under
<i>iconv</i> rather than using <i>dd</i>.</blockquote>



Bug 1966: Current/previous job definition scattered and ambiguous OPEN
https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1966

This item was discussed at length.

The following change was being considered but not yet agreed:

Change from:
If there is any suspended job, then the current job shall be a
suspended job

to:
If there is any suspended job, then the current job shall
be the most recently suspended job provided it is still in
a suspended state and no other job was started since it was
last suspended. Otherwise, it is unspecified which job shall
be the current job.


* Next Steps

We will start at bug 1966 next time.

Bugs to return to, bugs 1949, 1616, 1941.

The next call is on
Thu 2026-02-05 (WEBEX meeting - general bugs)

Apologies in advance:
Geoff Clare 2026-01-29

The calls are for 90 minutes

Calls are anchored on US time. (8am Pacific)


Please check the calendar invites for dial in details.

Bugs are at:
https://austingroupbugs.net

An etherpad is usually up for the meeting, with a URL using the date
format as below:

https://posix.rhansen.org/p/20xx-mm-dd

(For write access this uses The Open Group single sign on,
for those individuals with gitlab.opengroup.org accounts.
Please contact Andrew if you need to be setup)


--------
Andrew Josey                    The Open Group
Austin Group Chair          
Email: [email protected] 
Apex Plaza, Forbury Road,Reading,Berks.RG1 1AX,England

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