* John Goodyear <[email protected]> [2012-03-28T22:12:04]
> Under a previous conditional offer that was floated in the late fall,
> someone is interested in helping the effort out by providing an environment
> for some PERL developers/supporters to use to test more recent releases of
> PERL on z/OS.

Sorry for the delayed response.  I have been out of town, with very limited
internet access.

> To make sure they can support the effort, they would like this information:
>       [ ... ]

I can't answer any of this, other than to guess that the disk space will
probably be a few hundred megs at the most.  A perl tarball, unpacked, is about
75 MB.  It gets bigger when you build everything, but not by an order of
magnitude.  Even a complete git clone is under 300 MB.

One or two userids seems sufficient, since we've hardly seen more than that
number of people clamoring to help.

>       How much CPU time would be needed
>       How often these resources would be actively used
>       What level(s) of z/OS is required
>       Anything else that would help us make sure we understand what load
>       would be placed on a system where we let this run

No idea.

> Is there still a need for this?

Well, basically, there isn't a need.  The issue is that once upon a time, perl
worked on EBCDIC systems like z/OS, and there was quite a lot of work done to
make that so.  This fell into disrepair, and right now it won't built.  IBM
offers, as I recall, a patched 5.8, but there is no way to run a recent perl on
z/OS.  If nobody shows any intent to fix this, it's going to result in the
still-present-but-not-usable EBCDIC code being removed from the core for the
sake of maintainability.  Once that happens, I think it'll have a slim chance
of ever going back in.

So, there's only a need for this if folks have an interest in seeing perl work
on z/OS and other EBCDIC systems.  So far, it seems to me that the general lack
of response indicates that nobody much cares.

-- 
rjbs

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