The USENIX Association Newsletter Volume 7 Number 2 April 1982 CONTENTS Summary of the USENIX Association Board of Directors Meeting . Candidates for Officers and Directors of the USENIX Association Call For Tape Submissions ... Boston Meeting aH Uw New Releases From AT&T Typesetter-Independent TROFF AT&T announced the release of Typesetter-Independent TROFF on April 20. The package includes troff eqn, tbl refer, pic, and ideal. Typesetter independence has been implemented by having troffread a parameter file containing typesetter and font descriptions each time it is called. Troffwrites an ASCII file that describes in a general language the position, size, and font of each character. A post processor must be written for each typesetter to convert this typesetter-independent language into specific codes for that typesetter. The source license for commercial and government installations will be $4000 for the first CPU and $2000 for each additional CPU. For educational installations the license will be $300. UNIX for UNIVAC AT&T also announced the release of a Version 7-based UNIX for UNIVAC 1100 series systems. The source license for commercial and government installations will be $30000 for the first cpU and $10000 for each additional CPU. For educational installations the license will be $300. The two packages will be available for licensing on May 1, 1982, from: AT&T Technology Licensing Manager P.O. Box 25000 Greensburo, NC 27420 The deadline for submissions for the June issue of ;login: is May 24 NOTICE login: is the official newsletter of the USENIX Association, and is sent free of charge to individual and institutional members of the Association. The USENIX Association is an organization of AT&T licensees and sub-licensees formed for the purpose of exchanging information and ideas about the UNIX" operating system and the C programming language. It is a not-for-profit corporation incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware. The officers of the Association are: President Lou Katz Directors John Donnelly Vice-President Peter Weiner Ira Fuchs Secretary Lew Law Debbie Scherrer Treasurer Mel Ferentz Wally Wedel Membership information can be obtained from the office of the Association: USENIX Association Rockefeller University Box 8 1230 York Avenue New York, NY 10021 212-570-8934 Members of the UNIX community are heartily encouraged to contribute articles and suggestions for ;login:. Your contributions may be sent to the editor electronically: ucbvax!g:usenix or through the US mail: Lou Katz 541 Evans Hall EECS Department University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 The USENIX Association reserves the right to edit submitted material. slogin: is produced on UNIX using ¢reffand a variation of the ~me macros. We appreciate receiv- ing your contributions in n/troffinput format, using any macro package. If you contribute hardcopy articles please leave left and right margins of I" and a top margin of 1'4" and a bottom margin of 14". Hardcopy output from a line printer or most dot-matrix printers is not reproducible. login: Editor Lou Katz jlogin: Publisher Strong Consulting 5706 Van Fleet Ave Richmond, CA 94804 This newsletter may contain information covered by one or more licenses, copyrights, and/or non-disclosure agreements. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this newsletter is granted to Institutional Members of the USENIX Association, provided that copies are made for internal use at the member campus or plant site. “UNIX is a trademark of Bett Laboratories slogin: Summary of the USENIX Association Board of Directors Meeting To: Members of USENIX From: Lew Law, Secretary of USENIX Subject: Report on the Board meeting held Sunday, March 14th, 1982, continuing on Monday, March 15th, 1982 Date: March 19th, 1982 Present: Katz, Donnelly, Ferentz, Fuchs, Law, Scherrer, and Wedel The quarterly meeting of the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association was held at the Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston, the site of the Summer 1982 USENIX Conference. The purpose of the meeting was firstly to review arrangements being made for the Boston meeting in July, and secondly to deal with other business of the Association. All the nominees for election had been invited to attend. Sunday The following invitees were present: Suzanne MacNary, Local Arrangements Chairwoman for the Boston meeting being hosted by B.B.&N.; Kitty Dukakis, representing Rogal Associates, an organiza- tion hired to take care of the logistics of the conference; Bob Marsh, representing /usr/group; and nominees Bruce Borden, Alan Nemeth, and Brian Redman. The meeting was brought to order at 10:18 am, Sunday, March 14th, 1982. All of Sunday, through 6 pm was devoted to details of the forthcoming Boston meeting. Don- nelly stated that things seemed to be well in hand, and that there were no obvious problems at this time. A proposed budget developed by Suzanne MacNary was circulated, and various changes were dis- cussed and made. Donnelly presented the proposed registration fees for the meeting, but following some discussion it was decided to postpone action on this item until Bob Marsh was present and other items had been discussed, such as whether Proceedings of the conference would be produced, and the effect of scheduling of sessions. There is space for in excess of fifty 8’ by 10’ vendor booths. A schedule was set up for vendor solicitation, and, as a result of problems and complaints at Santa Monica, a decision made to require vendors to have completed setup of the exhibits before the the initial opening. Publicity for the meeting was addressed by Katz. He will work with Marleen Martin. A schedule for preparation and mailing of the various announcements for the meeting, including calls for abstracts was agreed upon, and the mailing details settled. The cost of mailing is non-trivial, and it was decided that, rather than send out complete registration information to the full mailing list, a preannouncement would be sent consisting of only a couple of pages giving sufficient information for people to request a complete registration packet. Nemeth, as Program Chairman, reported on facilities available. Function rooms at both the Cop- ley and the Sheraton were available, the two largest holding 1000 and 400, and there are 900 rooms available for attendees. After some discussion of tutorials, and the experience at Santa Monica, it was proposed that an advanced tutorial be added, possibly on the internals of 4.1 and 4.2BSD. There were various licensing and non-disclosure problems that had to be worked out, but it was thought these were not insuperable. Borden, being responsible for tutorials, will work out the details. A rough outline of the meeting format was worked out, but will obviously be dependent on papers submitted. At this point, a tour of the facilities of the Copley was taken, followed by lunch. The meeting reconvened at 3 pm. The dates for Board meetings at the conference were agreed upon, the first to be held on Monday, July 5th to discuss conference business only, followed by a meeting on Friday, July 9th, at which the newly elected Board would take office, and deal with any other business. Discussion of the possibility of producing conference proceedings was fairly lengthy. Nemeth said he was trying to raise the technical level of the meeting, and proposed that papers be collected, but without a formal announcement that proceedings would be published. If sufficient were submitted, a proceedings would be published, and if not, those submitted would be published in the Newsletter. Volume 7, Number 2 April 1982 3 jlogin: The budget was reconsidered at this point, various adjustments made, and the registration fees for the conference set. It had been agreed the meeting would recess at 6pm, and it was so moved. Monday The meeting was brought to order at 9:10 am by Katz. Present were Katz, Donnelly, Ferentz, Fuchs, Law, Scherrer, Wedel, Borden, Nemeth and Redman. The minutes of the Santa Monica Board meeting were accepted in the amended version circulated prior to the meeting. Various items pending from past conferences were dealt with. Wedel reported that there was a surplus of approximately $9,000 from the Austin, Texas meeting. After allowing added expenses for the Santa Monica conference, there appeared to be a surplus of approximately $20,000. Donnelly said that Judy DesHarnais had done an excellent job of budgeting and keeping track of expenses, and had presented an excellent summary which he proposed to include in the Local Arrangements Handbook as an example. Donnelly said that arrangements were already being made for the San Diego meeting in January of 1983, and it was necessary to hire help. Conventions West, the company hired for the Santa Monica meeting, had made a proposal, which he would like to accept. They had turned in an impressive per- formance at that meeting, and through their expertise had saved the USENIX Association a considerable amount of money. It was agreed that Conventions West should be hired for the San Diego meeting. Law reported on the status of nominations. No additional nominations have yet been received. The date for close of nominations is April 10th. It was proposed and accepted that Peter Weiner, as a disinterested party, be asked to act as teller for the elections. There has been a lot of discussion at Board meetings about the constituency that USENIX does or should represent, and there are very considerable differences of opinion. Katz, as part of a review of the Bylaws, had proposed a major change in membership and voting structure. As a new Board will take office in July, it was thought appropriate to place this item on the agenda with the object of setting out clearly defined alternatives that could be put before a meeting of the present voting members at the San Diego meeting. It was also agreed that further discussion of Bylaws changes should be made the last item on the agenda, as it was an infinite sink for time. Conference attendee lists were discussed, and it was thought that they were very useful to atten- dees, particularly if they contained telephone numbers and net addresses. It was agreed that a state- ment would be added to the document requesting that it not be used for advertising purposes. A related item, that of use of mailing lists for advertising was discussed. Katz said that SIGGRAPH charged $60 per thousand names, which was about 100 times less than the fees set by USENIX several years ago. It was proposed and accepted that the list be made available for commercial purposes, as it was thought it would be of value to the membership, but that means must be made available for members to request removal of their names from the list. The mechanics and costs of doing this were discussed, and a charge of 25 cents per label appeared to be appropriate. Interested vendors could submit stuffed envelopes to which the USENIX office would affix labels, hence keeping some semblance of control of the list. Scherrer reported that the Distribution Tape Subcommittee had produced a set of guidelines for submission of material on tape. [See the article ‘Call for Tape Submissions” in this issue. -Pub] The committee is preparing an annotated summary of the Santa Monica submissions, which will be pub- lished in the Newsletter about the time tapes are ready for distribution. The problem of Newsletters was discussed next. Wedel proposed that a single issue of about 160 pages be sent out, instead of individual issues for 1981. This was accepted. Copies should be ready for Board approval within two weeks. At the previous Board meeting Katz had volunteered to get out the January 1982 newsletter, and stated that it had been phototypeset and had been mailed. Three organi- zations had submitted bids for production of the newsletter, but copies were not then available for the Board. Wedel was asked to make recommendations at the next Board meeting. There was much dis- cussion as to the number of newsletters per year that should be produced, and it was finally agreed that six would be a reasonable number. Katz volunteered to be editor. Meanwhile, Strong Consulting, who 4 April 1982 Volume 7, Number 2 slogin: produced the summary of the Santa Monica Conference and the January 1982 newsletter for Katz, will, under Katz’s supervision, produce the next three issues, to be dated May 1, July 1 and Sept 1. Law intends to retire from the UNIX manual distribution business as of July Ist, 1982, as it is becoming a considerable burden. Publishing organizations are beginning to produce manuals, but they do not seem to be readily available to the public. Law, at the request of the Board, had written to Otis Wilson of AT&T exploring the possibility of USENIX performing a distribution role. No reply has as yet been received. It was proposed and accepted that an audit of the financial records would be appropriate at this time prior to the election of the new Board. Ferentz was authorized to pursue this. Two firm proposals had been received for the Winter meeting in 1984, from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and from Tektronix in Portland, Or. Donnelly said that the facilities available at each location were very good. After some discussion, it was proposed and accepted that the 1984 Winter meeting be held January 23rd through Jan 27th, 1984, in Salt Lake City, with consideration of Portland for 1985. In view of the possible retirement of Ferentz from the Board, discussion as to the location of the USENIX office and help to run the organization has become an item of some urgency. There are several issues: budgeting for personnel and licensing being the most obvious. The problem of licensing had always been covered by Rockefeller University having all relevant licenses. It was agreed that the USENIX Association should apply to AT&T for an agreement to handle but not use licensed material - Katz was requested to follow up. A committee of Ferrin, Fuchs, Katz and Scherrer was set up to pro- pose a course of action which should include a short term proposal and a long term solution. After other minor items were dealt with, discussion returned to proposed changes in the Bylaws. It has become very apparent that the timing of elections for the new Board is not very good, in that there is no chance for overlap to help towards a smooth transition. An attempt has been made to cir- cumvent the problem for the forthcoming election by inviting nominees to the Board Meetings, but there are some inherent problems in doing this. A proposal that the election process be set up so that elections are complete before the Spring Board meeting was considered, but was deferred to the next Board meeting. The meeting was adjourned at 4 pm as had been agreed to allow travel to the West Coast on the evening flights. Candidates for Officers and Directors of the USENIX Association Nominations for Officers and Directors of the USENIX Association closed April 10, 1982. No new nominations were received, so the slate of candidates is the slate presented by the Nominating Commit- tee in January: Nominees for officers: President Lou Katz Vice President John L. Donnelly Secretary Lewis A. Law Treasurer Thomas Ferrin Nominees for Directors (four positions): Bruce S. Borden Deborah K. Scherrer Alan G. Nemeth Waily Wedel Brian Redman Mike Zuhl Ballots will be mailed to all current INSTITUTIONAL (voting) members of the Association on May 15th, and must be returned on or before June 15th. It is very important for the future of the Associa- tion that all Institutional members take the time and effort to consider the nominees and select those they consider most appropriate for the tasks ahead. Volume 7, Number 2 April 1982 5 slogin: Call For Tape Submissions The USENIX distribution tapes represent the primary means of software distribution and sharing among non-commercial UNIX sites. Because of their importance to the community, USENIX will attempt to produce two distribution tapes this year, as well as providing annotations of their contents in ;/ogin: Procedures for Submission If you have material to share with your colleagues, either mail your tape directly to the USENIX office or bring it with you to the Boston meeting. Either tar or ¢pformats are acceptable. To assure the return of your tape after it is copied, include your name and address on the tape label. Licensing Restrictions After your tape is copied, you will receive a form listing all your file names. You will have to indicate the licensing restrictions on each of these files, have your installation representative sign the form, and return it to us. It is the returning of these release forms that has previously held up distribution of the tapes. You can speed up the procedure by promptly returning your release, or by providing a signed statement of licensing restrictions when you submit your tape. The myriad of licensing agreements now available from AT&T has significantly complicated the distribution tape procedures. USENIX must prepare a different tape for each license affected by submis- sions. This is time consuming. You can help by carefully evaluating your own software for licensing restrictions. For instance, code running on a V7 system may not necessarily be covered by a V7 license if it simply calls standard system and library routines. Submitting the source and appropriate make files (but not binaries) might aliow us to freely distribute your software without licensing restrictions. Remember, though, that you as the submittee have final responsibility for determining and honoring any license or copyright restrictions applicable to your code. Guidelines for Preparing Submissions In the interest of the prompt and correct dissemination of submissions, we present these guide- lines. They are by no means considered to be strict rules, but we have found them to be desirable, and encourage their use by anyone who submits machine readable software to the USENIX organization. Should we determine that the time spent processing the submissions is due mainly to trying to reorgan- ize the submission to make it useful, then we may refuse submissions in the interest of quickly process- ing those that have complied with the guidelines. a, Usefulness Please try to eliminate ‘‘useless’’ directory levels in submission materials. Our definition of ‘‘use- less’’ directories includes but is not limited to the use of a single directory within another directory, or the inclusion of backup or non-functioning test directories. b. Reievancy Please submit only those files which are relevant to the distribution. In other words, no ‘‘.o files. Also any ‘“‘backup”’ files are really not necessary, and can only slow down the process by forcing us, in the interest of making sure that the file is not useful, to compare it with similarly named files. ” 6 April 1982 Volume 7, Number 2 slogin: c. Environment Please be as specific as you can as to the nature of the environment which your submission needs in order to function properly. If this requires stating that particular directories or files need be present, or certain system calls are necessary, then by all means include this information, and any helpful hints as how to implement these if you feel they may not be present. d. Documentation Documentation is probably the most useful of these requests, and really could be included in any of the above guidelines, but it is a significant factor in itself. Remember, you submitted these materials in the interest of providing useful tools to someone else. In many cases, these are rather complex “tools” and without documentation may require as much or possibly more time than would have been originally required to write the code from scratch. Be as descriptive as you can in all areas of your sub- mission. Remember you already know how to use the submission. Your goal is to make it useful for someone else. We certainly encourage and will adopt any other useful suggestions that will further enable us to process the submissions. Thank you, in advance, for your cooperation. USENIX Tape Committee: Deborah K. Scherrer Jeff Hardy Phil Cohen Boston Meeting The USENIx Association will hold its 1982 summer conference in conjunction with the Software Tools Users Group and /usr/group in Boston on July 6-9. The conference will be held at the Copley Plaza and Sheraton Hotels. The agenda is: Tuesday July 6 USENIX meetings and technical talks Wednesday July 7 USENIX meetings and technical talks Thursday July 8 joint sessions by USENIX and /usr/group Friday July 9 parallel sessions by /usr/group and Software Tools Various levels of UNIX tutorials will be held Tuesday July 6 and Friday July 9. Further information will be contained in the pre-registration packet. If you did not receive a meeting pre-announcement and wish to be on the mailing list for receipt of the pre-registration packet please contact the USENIX Association office. The 1983 Association meetings are scheduled for January in San Diego and June in Toronto. Volume 7, Number 2 April 1982 7 UseNix Association Rockefeller University Box 8 1230 York A . ; New ee New York 10021 First Class Mail