On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 08:23:16AM -0700, Joe McMahon wrote: > Please keep us informed on this - I remember enough of my MVS systems > programming skills to run a Hercules emulator MVS here as well if it > will work for a smoke platform. Insufficient round tuits at the moment > to start working out the build environment from scratch, though.
The only "public domain" style MVS that's in circulation is MVS 3.8J. As noted in another post, there's absolutely no USS, whatsoever. However, as my system programming experience is heavy with both VM as well as MVS, this may or may not be an insurmountable problem (I have never used perl on MVS, USS or no), as I used to munge MVS disks from the "outside" (i.e. from VM) all the time. I wrote an MVS VTOC editor in CMS/XEDIT a long long time ago (in a galaxy far far away). I think the notion I was raising was that there are "legal" z/OS licenses out there which would conceivably allow running a virtual z/OS inside an ordinary PC, thus relieving the hurdle of the "multi-million-dollar" hardware. Having said all that, if anyone thinks that it's worth exploring, I've no problem in doing so myself, or just grant remote access to whomever... > MVS is a real EBCDIC system, though an older one (IBM's gone through 3 > OS architecture transitions at this point, starting at MVS). It should > be "good enough" to test the EBCDIC code on. After over 30 continuous years, I still think in EBCDIC, not ASCII. > On Oct 3, 2011, at 3:58 AM, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote: > > > 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)
