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Postings from February 2014
On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 05:29:21PM -0600, Craig A. Berry wrote: > On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Ricardo Signes > <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org> wrote: > > > > As was brought up about 18 months ago... > > > > http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.mvs/2011/09/msg1545.html > > http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.mvs/2012/01/msg1598.html > > > > ...support for z/OS, specifically EBCDIC support, is on the chopping block. So > > far, no dedicated resources, human or otherwise, have been provided. > > There aren't dedicated resources for any other platform as far as I > can tell, so that's a bit of a double standard. "Consistently > available" might be a bit more reasonable. Yes, that's a reasonable correction for the wording. The intent remains the same, and and as you commented in another e-mail: On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 05:35:40PM -0600, Craig A. Berry wrote: > On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Brad Gilbert <b2gills@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Really all that is being asked is that someone compile Perl, and run some tests > > on a regular basis. Which can, and should be automated. > > With the promise to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. > > That would be a good start but it's going to take quite a bit more > than that. Someone with domain expertise or at least machine access > would need to monitor the test results and submit patches for things > that get broken. The problem isn't z/OS itself. Another OS isn't a big deal, as perl builds on platforms which none of the committers have access to. We know this because we get reports back from people who are building on them, with minor patches to fix up inadvertent breakage or portability issues. The problem is that unlike every other platform, Perl on z/OS is using EBCDIC, and UTF-EBCDIC. None of the commiters, and none of the other regular contributors have any access to anything EBCDIC. So it's quite possible to inadvertently totally break all EBCDIC systems, in a way which is quite impossible to do for ASCII based systems, because if you're on an ASCII based system you know about it. Which is bad. And we have no feedback abut this. Which is worse. An internally ASCII-based perl on z/OS would not have any of these problems. But we don't have that. :-( Nicholas ClarkThread Previous | Thread Next