If you have a genuine EBCDIC environment, yes, that would help immensely. The old OS might require some tweaking of the build process, e.g. the hints/*.sh, but the EBCDICness would be very useful. (Of course, if you have never built Perl 5 on this system, you might have quite a few initial hurdles before getting to 'make test' stage...)
If you have the time time, yes, please do try building Perl 5.14 on this system, or probably preferably even the 5.15 development branch. I'm certain perl5-porters will be more than happy to help you. On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Henry Yen <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 12:18:55PM +0200, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: >> The EBCDIC systems (IBM mainframes running z/os or their close >> variants in other similar mainframes, BUT NOT the Linux-on-z/os which >> uses ASCII) are rare, and because of their multi-million dollar price >> tags, and often financially related applications, they are closely >> guarded by their users. Therefore getting random open source >> developers any access to the systems is really hard. (Perl 5 porters >> lucked out in early 5.8 in that they had access to not just one but >> two z/os systems, one within Texas Instruments, and one in an IBM >> development center. Unfortunately these accesses no more exist, and >> it has been proven extraordinarily hard to find any people within IBM >> that would make them arrange software development access to anyone >> external.) > > I still run the old "public-domain"-ish MVS 3.8 and VMr6 on a Hercules > emulator. Although access to a modern z/OS software system still > requires effort and/or money, access to genuine hardware isn't > necessarily an impediment? > > -- > Henry Yen <[email protected]> Aegis Information Systems, > Inc. > Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York > (800) AEGIS-00 x949 1-800-AEGIS-00 (800-234-4700) > > -- There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
