Jean-Yves MENGANT added the comment: Let me provide my contribution to this discussion around this ZOS port topic : I initially made the Python 2.2 and 2.4 for ZOS platform and ask the python community to link to my pages as a support to ZOS at that time
Lauri get in touch with me couple of weeks ago asking if I was planning to make a port of the 2.5 ; since I was waiting for 2.6 before initiating a new port, He goes ahead and makes the 2.5 port happen now. About how important is the ZOS system ; let me argue around that : even if ZOS is an IBM proprietary OS which has been there for decades it will be there for a long time since it occupies a very specific 'niche' on the os'es market And since IBM has heavily spoiled the migration path to Unix in order to keep its revenues on it migrating those systems to plain vanilla unixes is a nightmare => Today every US or European big company s having a ZOS sytem somewhere. Next even if ZOS is proprietary and EBCDIC it has a peasonable POSIX.5 compliant subsystem and a descent C/C++ compiler which makes the port of python not too complex. >From a script standpoint there are today 3 available scripting languages availables : - REXX (the mike cowlishaw script language) , perl and python) So keeping an accurate version of python on this platform makes sense as well to increase the python language usage Next I am still happy to continue supporting the ZOS port and I perfectly understand that fully integrating the ZOS idiosynchrasies into the Python main branch generates maintenability problems ... But some of the submitted problems included into Lauri patch are not ZOS specific and increase and simply increase the portability of the python Kernel to EBCDIC platform(ZOS and OS400) So finally my opinion here is the the problem can be splitted into two parts : 1 General improvements patches which improves the Python kernel which can be incorporated in the python kernel and which may not be to complicated to maintain on the main branch 2 ZOS idiosynchrasies (mainly located in making the autoconf/automake and build scripts compliant with ZOS ); this can be done specifically by zos python specialists which have access to ZOS mainframe in order to be able to test. I am happy to continue to make the topic 2 availables on the ZOS python port pages with the help of others contributors like Lauri and give them credit on the ZOS port page. So I propose to integrate lauri's patch in the 2.5.1 current and provide a modified ZOS compliant source tar containing modified autoconf/automake and dynamic loading stuff I Finally should emphazise on 2 complementary arguments : - The ZOS port has been used in industrial products(including the company for which I work today) and contributes to promote the python language on important non unix platforms showing the extreme portability of the language. - Even the IBM Labs in Boulder(colorado) get in touch with me in order to integrate the port in one of their project. ---------- nosy: +JYMEN __________________________________ Tracker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://bugs.python.org/issue1298> __________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
