P1394> December 1212r Minutes

John Fuller was encouraged to be secretary for this meeting.

Previous meeting minutes were adopted without objection.

Document is 98-005r0.pdf on our web site. Discussion centered on the choice of a more limited 7-bit ASCII character set. Peter Johansson moved that we use the character set that includes "a"-"z", "0"-"9", and "-". Seconded by John Fuller. Motion passes 5-0-0. John Fuller moved and Atsushi Nakamura seconded that 98-005 as modified be incorporated into section 8.

Document is fdirprop.pdf on our web site. Discussion centered on the differences between feature directories and dependent info directories. It was concluded that there is a difference in that dependent info directories get their format from the context of their parent and as such must only be pointed to by one directory; feature directories on the other hand specify their own format and may be pointed to by multiple parents (e.g. instance directory and unit directory).

We discussed John Fuller’s proposal to allow Vendor and Model keys to appear in unit directories. Consensus: These key should be allowed in unit directories, the Vendor immediate key shall appear in the root directory even if a Vendor directory is present. Similarly, if vendor identification is used in a unit directory then the Vendor immediate key shall appear in the unit directory even if a Vendor directory is present. The Model key only has the immediate form. The specified vendor administers the 24-bit number.

DavidJ will give Peter a write up of extended keys to be incorporated into section 8.

Document is 98-004r3.pdf on our web site. Daniel described the changes made to this document that were requested at the last meeting. John Fuller moved and Peter Johansson seconded that the document be rolled into the section 8 document with the single change of swapping the top two fields of Language Specifier. Passed without objections.

We discussed the problem of a single function instance with two protocols (e.g. a printer with SBP-2 and DPP) with both units listed in the root directory. There is no good answer for the vendor here, either he only puts one unit in the root and loses the other capability for legacy enumerators or he puts both units into the root and lives with the user confusion and possible improper operation for legacy enumerators. Consensus: Devices that use instance directories ideally will have no unit directories pointed to by the root directory; if the vendor needs to deal legacy enumerators we recommend that a single unit directory from each instance directory be included in the root; if this is still insufficient then we’ve warned you, just do what you want and live with the consequences.

These packets begin with 16 bits of reserved, then 24 bits of Company-ID (cf. OUI), then 24 bits of format identifier (assigned by owner of Company-ID), packet size should be between 8 and 64 bytes.

This location only accepts block writes, quadlet writes give type-error.

Behavior for writes of greater than 64 bytes or misaligned writes are bus dependent.

It was decided that the message request/response could be used to build a private protocol to modify ROM and hence does not need to be defined by 1212r. Changing ROM is tricky, caveat emptor; Peter to craft some text.

Web site submissions for January meeting are due directly to Greg LeClair by 1/8/99.

Meeting will just be one day, 1/26/99.