Cross-posted to IBM-MAIN. Part of the problem is administrative. Some shops provide no OMVS segment or user file system space by default to programmers. You have to ask for and justify it.
Part of the problem is, indeed, the unavailability of the commonly used GNU tools (again, you need the sysprogs to install the tools that are ported, and that means a justified request must be made). The commonly available z/OS Unix tools just don't work the same as the GNU versions in many cases, and this drives people away. Part of the problem for classic mainframe programmers is that most of the tools don't directly support classic MVS datasets. Even simple sequential text data needs to be copied to *FS file system space to be usable by the tools, and that is an unacceptable waste of storage (which is still scarce in some shops). AWK, as a counter-example, does support classic datasets, but most tools do not. Or did not, I may be out-of-date with that assessment. Part of the problem is poor performance. I will admit up front that I have not personally re-visited this issue in a few years, but there was a time I tried to port a fairly complex text-processing AWK script from PC to z/OS Unix. What took only 10 seconds to execute on the PC was running in batch for over 15 minutes (and still not complete) and consuming 25% of the CPU on a 5-engine LPAR. That is just not supportable, and is in fact inexcusable. It drives people away. Too many reasons not to use it, and not enough business- and programmer-friendly reasons to use it. They need to do much better. Adapting the Linux kernel to be the OMVS kernel would have been a better solution than adapting AIX IMHO, but I already know that that isn't ever going to change. Peter > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:ASSEMBLER- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Comstock > Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 8:45 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Why are z/OS people so reluctant to use z/OS UNIX? > > When I grew up in the mainframe world, UNIX was > considered to be the enemy. But I was working for > IBM, and UNIX products were competitors, so that's > kind of an expected perspective. <Snipped> > I'd like to understand this visceral reaction, with an > eye to seeing what can be done to moderate it down to at > least a level of skepticism ("OK, what can this do for > me?"). This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
