Contracted by IBM to help with the development of conformance testing software for the IEEE Posix standard, Mindcraft Inc, Palo Alto, California, reports that it has now delivered a working version of the P1003.1 test suite to the US National Bureau of Standards, although work on the final version continues. Mindcraft vice-president Nalebuff, said that Bureau was also working on a conformance testing suite for the .1 component of Posix – which includes the operating system service interface and C language library definitions – the difference between the two test suites being that the NBS will take account of any Federal Information Procurement Standards options added to Posix by the US government during the balloting process, currently under way. The Mindcraft/IBM suite will be more general, testing products for straight conformance to Posix, and unlike the Bureau suite, it does not expect to see a conforming system. Both are likeley to be available this month through the Bureau, which is expected to charge administration costs only. Mindcraft says that it is the only party active in .2 conformance testing – this includes shell and application utilities – but thus is currently still in the development stage.
