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Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
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"Terwedow, Egon (E.)"  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 2:41 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs
From: eterw...@ford.com ("Terwedow, Egon (E.)")
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:41:03 +0000
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 2:41 am
Subject: RE: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
Hello,

We still customize Perl in our USS environment and we use it in a few of our web interfaces. I would appreciate if the open source community will continue to support the product.

This is not highest priority and we do not need latest releases in line with the rest of the Perl community but it would be important to continue the IBM open source commitment to have Perl on the list of supported products.

Please let me know if you decide to stop the support for Perl so that I can inform the user community in my company that this is no longer a viable solution.

Thanks and kind regards from the global Ford company.  

Kind Regards,
Egon Terwedow, Supervisor Global Mainframe Engineering
NE/E-119, (8701.8455) ext. +49.221.901.8455 Mobile +49 173 6467850,VOIP 8703-0374
Ford-Werke GmbH,Henry-Ford-Straße 1, 50735 Köln,Sitz der Gesellschaft: Köln,Registergericht Köln, HRB 54183,Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Stephen Odell,Geschäftsführung: Bernhard Mattes (Vorsitzender), Wolfgang Booms, Dirk Heller, Caspar Hohage, Dr. Hermann H. Hollmann, Rainer Ludwig, Rüdiger Minrath, Dr. Wolfgang Schneider


 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 12:06 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:06:35 +0200
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 12:06 pm
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl

> Do you know if IBM has resources dedicated to maintaining Perl for z/OS?
> We'd be absolutely thrilled to engage with them to help ensure that Perl
> works well on z/OS, but without some involvement from IBM, it'd be quite
> difficult for us to do so.

> Are IBM's changes to Perl 5.8.7 freely available?

AFAICT all of (or 90+% of it) those changes have been merged into the
mainline.  Search the perl5-porters archives for "z/os", maybe 4-6 years
ago.  IIRC there has been at least two batches of patches (ha!):
once from some IBM India, and once from some IBM China.  Or maybe search
for the approriate hints changes.

> Does IBM have a way to provide free access to z/OS for opensource
> developers?

No.  I tried several times, but the people inside IBM (or the IBM people
within z/os) simply don't get this "open source thing". They expect
companies, and companies paying Real Money, and companies
Signing With IBM to do this work.  About two years ago I tried to work
with Merijn Broeren's help to make IBM understand, to no avail.

We lucked out about ten years ago in that somebody within IBM
understood the benefit of having such access, and I got access to a
z/os box for a few weeks, and NI-S had access to a TI z/os box, so
we were able to port early 5.8.x releases.  But that window is no more
there.

Executive summary: some current users of the Perl on z/OS need to step
up, and do the porting/support, or it will not happen.


 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 12:11 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:11:21 +0200
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 12:11 pm
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl

> Executive summary: some current users of the Perl on z/OS need to step
> up, and do the porting/support, or it will not happen.

I haven't seen the beginning of the discussion: is the plan to remove
#ifdef EBCDIC etc. code?  Is it such a maintenance burden?  I thought it
was reasonably well contained.

 
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Peter Prymmer  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 12:13 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: PPrym...@factset.com (Peter Prymmer)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:13:32 +0000
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 12:13 pm
Subject: RE: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
Doesn't taking it out represent more (potentially risky) work?
What would satisfy this request?  A patch to a hints file?

Peter Prymmer


 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 12:19 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:19:45 +0200
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 12:19 pm
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
On Monday-201109-26 18:13, Peter Prymmer wrote:

> Doesn't taking it out represent more (potentially risky) work?

That's what I am wondering.  Even in the best case it makes the
(hopefully eventual) restoring of the platform quite a bit messier
(since the code will live, making patching harder).


 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 12:55 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:55:48 +0200
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 12:55 pm
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
On Monday-201109-26 18:36, Leon Timmermans wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Jarkko Hietaniemi<j...@iki.fi>  wrote:

>>> Executive summary: some current users of the Perl on z/OS need to step
>>> up, and do the porting/support, or it will not happen.

>> I haven't seen the beginning of the discussion: is the plan to remove #ifdef
>> EBCDIC etc. code?  Is it such a maintenance burden?  I thought it was
>> reasonably well contained.

> Part of the problem is that no one even knows if it works. It is
> almost certain to be broken given various changes, and no one knows
> how much work it would be to fix it, nor can anyone test those fixes.

I understand that.  But as long as you don't have access, you have no
way of knowing whether or nor how much of it is broken.  If the code is
removed, it will be 100% broken.


 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 12:57 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:57:54 +0200
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 12:57 pm
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl

> Without reaching something like this, longer term, the steady state of
> EBCDIC is going to be "broken", which benefits no-one.

Fair enough.  Not my problem, either way.


 
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Peter Prymmer  
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 More options Sep 26 2011, 1:22 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: PPrym...@factset.com (Peter Prymmer)
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:22:15 +0000
Local: Mon, Sep 26 2011 1:22 pm
Subject: RE: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
I think tossing in an #error is preferable to worrying too much about
EBCDIC support.  Wholesale removal of the port(s) leaves a lot
of work for the prospective future patcher to get started with,
whereas a clear #error in running miniperl might be more easily
fixed.  I do not think ASCII based perl maintainers have to consider
the EBCDIC ports too much.  Writing code (especially tests) that breaks
EBCDIC does happen and can be fixed.  The burden of providing the fix
is raised quite a bit higher if the EBCDIC stuff already in is removed.

Peter Prymmer


 
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"Dean, Sandy"  
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 More options Sep 28 2011, 7:41 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs
From: sandy-d...@ti.com ("Dean, Sandy")
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:41:23 +0000
Local: Wed, Sep 28 2011 7:41 am
Subject: RE: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
I will ask IBM.

Sandy Dean


 
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"Dean, Sandy"  
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 More options Sep 30 2011, 7:39 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs
From: sandy-d...@ti.com ("Dean, Sandy")
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:39:02 +0000
Local: Fri, Sep 30 2011 7:39 am
Subject: RE: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
Here is the question I asked IBM:

What is IBM's stance on supporting perl from this point
forward? I am a heavy user of perl in the USS environment, and would    
need to redesign my applications if perl were to go unsupported.        

The open source group currently supporting perl on z/os is unable to    
continue because as things break (which they have), they have no        
platform on which to test, and no z/os developers who have the time to  
step up to the task.                                                    

It is looking like IBM will need to officially support this product on  
USS or it is going to die a painful death.                              

Please let me know your thoughts.

Here is their response:

IBM will continue to support the Ported Tools version of Perl for the  
forseeable future. It's separate from the open source code base.        
                                                                       .
If and when the decision is made to support a newer version of Perl, IBM
will tackle the EBCDIC aspects.        


 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 30 2011, 8:20 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:20:51 +0200
Local: Fri, Sep 30 2011 8:20 am
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
The response of IBM stinks.

There should be no 'forks' of open source projects maintained by
vendors.  That just leads into pain and suffering.  Or at the very
least divergence and obsolescence.

--
There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is
'dead'. -- Jack Cohen

 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 30 2011, 10:25 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:25:14 +0200
Local: Fri, Sep 30 2011 10:25 am
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 4:19 PM, David Nicol <davidni...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 8:32 AM, Konovalov, Vadim (Vadim)** CTR **

>> There is another approach from their, which is quite unlikely: they could
>> start spending their efforts and resources on improving EBCDIC on perl,
>> but I very much doubt so.

> a sensible approach is to define an EBCDIC input-output layer and be done
> with it.

You haven't looked at the EBCDIC code, have you?


--
There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is
'dead'. -- Jack Cohen

 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Sep 30 2011, 2:34 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 20:34:43 +0200
Local: Fri, Sep 30 2011 2:34 pm
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl

>> You haven't looked at the EBCDIC code, have you?

> this won't suffice? assuming an ascii-based shell?
> dd conv=ebcdic | perl ... | dd conv=ascii
> I had an acount on a "zpenguin" for a while and that environment was all
> ascii. Also opposite-endian from x86, which made it a really stupid choice
> for testing bit-twiddling methods for accelerating utf8 character counts via
> machine word operations.

This is not Linux.  This is not zpenguin.  In the real z/os
environment there's nothing ASCII.  perl -le 'print ord("A")' doesn't
do what you expect.

--
There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is
'dead'. -- Jack Cohen


 
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Karl Williamson  
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 More options Sep 30 2011, 3:05 pm
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: pub...@khwilliamson.com (Karl Williamson)
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:05:45 -0600
Local: Fri, Sep 30 2011 3:05 pm
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
On 09/30/2011 05:39 AM, Dean, Sandy wrote:

It is my understanding that more modern Perls will compile and run when
the locale is utf8.  We also have Encode available to translate EBCDIC
data to Unicode on input, and back on output.

It's quite likely that the current EBCDIC bugs have an easy solution.
I've already figured out a trivial fix for the cases I know about where
there are hard-coded UTF-8 vs UTF-EBCDIC string constants.

(I also have an idea for a trivial change to generate Unicode property
tables translated into EBCDIC, and that might make the rest of the code
cleaner in a number of places.)

But without a test bed, we would never be sure that anything we do
actually works.

It's likely that many CPAN modules are written without consideration of
EBCDIC.  Some of these are easy to fix.  For example, hard-coded hex
character constants can be made to work simply by writing, e.g. \N{U+DF}
instead of \x{DF}.  The distinction between the UTF forms is harder to
deal with.  As are assumptions like the ordinal of I is 1 less than the
ordinal of J.  I have no idea how common those things are in modules,
but I do know that most of those are ok in the Perl core.

I wasn't around at the time, but I have gotten the sense that there is
bad blood between IBM and the Perl developer community.  IBM appears to
be unwilling to do anything until and if there is sufficient demand from
its current or potential customers.  If none of those customers can
offer us computer time for testing, that tells me there is insufficient
demand for up-to-date Perls.


 
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Jarkko Hietaniemi  
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 More options Oct 1 2011, 3:49 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: j...@iki.fi (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:49:03 +0200
Local: Sat, Oct 1 2011 3:49 am
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
I don't know about "bad blood"... irritation, maybe.  Amazement at the
pigheadedness of IBM, why they don't see how the current model doesn't
work.  Their current model of maintaining an obsolete fork doesn't work.
Well, to be fair, they do every couple of years throw a bunch of poorly
documented patches over the wall.  But they have never responded to any
of our feedback and/or questions about the patches.  Some of them have
been integrated, some haven't.

Personally, I'm mightily irritated at my and NI-S' work being wasted
this way.  And I think we are fooling ourselves if we claim that it'll
be easy to "merge the changes back in".  It was a mess.
The assumptions of ASCII run deep.


 
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Karl Williamson  
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 More options Oct 1 2011, 11:57 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: pub...@khwilliamson.com (Karl Williamson)
Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:57:22 -0600
Local: Sat, Oct 1 2011 11:57 am
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl
On 10/01/2011 01:49 AM, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:

> I don't know about "bad blood"... irritation, maybe. Amazement at the
> pigheadedness of IBM, why they don't see how the current model doesn't
> work. Their current model of maintaining an obsolete fork doesn't work.
> Well, to be fair, they do every couple of years throw a bunch of poorly
> documented patches over the wall. But they have never responded to any
> of our feedback and/or questions about the patches. Some of them have
> been integrated, some haven't.

> Personally, I'm mightily irritated at my and NI-S' work being wasted
> this way. And I think we are fooling ourselves if we claim that it'll
> be easy to "merge the changes back in". It was a mess.
> The assumptions of ASCII run deep.

I would hate to see it wasted as well.  And I like the elegance of it.
But, even if IBM doesn't come through, as it seems clear, they won't.
We could still continue to support EBCDIC on Perl if we were able to get
access to an EBCDIC machine for testing and minimal development.  That
means that all we would need is for a user with the right environment to
step forward.  Failing that, it means that no user (if not personally,
then their company) finds it sufficiently important to have more modern
Perls working in an EBCDIC environment.

 
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Nicholas Clark  
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 More options Oct 3 2011, 5:03 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: n...@ccl4.org (Nicholas Clark)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 10:03:52 +0100
Local: Mon, Oct 3 2011 5:03 am
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl

a: I think that you're missing the possibility of EBCDIC users having XS
   code that interfaces to local C libraries that are assuming EBCDIC

b: My hunch is that
   i)  Craig is right - if all the EBCDIC related code were removed in one
       (or few) clearly labeled the tools associated with git would make it
       fairly easy to track where it should be added back in (even if it
       doesn't automatically apply)
   ii) that won't make it easy to make things *work*.

   but that in terms of total effort, it won't be much different because
   *all* the existing EBCDIC code is suspect, and will have to be reviewed,
   because in recent years some chunks of it will have been edited "in good
   faith" on non-EBCDIC systems, without ever being tested on an EBCDIC
   platform.

   Hence it has to be reviewed, whether it's being added back, or whether
   it stayed in.

and I then feel the urge to restate this:

Without an ongoing facility on which to regularly test the development
version of perl, breakages are going to slowly accumulate. This will happen
even if the people making the changes to the perl core are thinking of
EBCDIC, and trying not to break it.

[Consider what happens at the moment with Win32 and VMS, which are regularly
tested. There are still lots of small test breakages, because most people
are developing on some flavour of Unix, and don't even realise that they
have made a portability error. These get fixed fairly quickly, because "we"
know about them, and some of "us" have access to the relevant platforms,
understand them well enough, and personally have reason to care about them
still working. Which means that future changes don't come to rely on the
wrongness.]

So what's needed are

1) a testing facility just to stand still.

2) the pool of active core developers expands to include people who care
   about keeping perl on EBCDIC working.

The existing core developers ("the community") is not able to provide either
of the above. It seems that IBM isn't able to provide either of the above.

HP do not make such a mistake with VMS - they provide access to OpenVMS
systems to facilitate open source porting.

Just for once, HP is doing something right. :-) IBM should learn from HP.

Nicholas Clark


 
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Nicholas Clark  
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 More options Oct 3 2011, 5:07 am
Newsgroups: perl.mvs, perl.perl5.porters
From: n...@ccl4.org (Nicholas Clark)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 10:07:37 +0100
Local: Mon, Oct 3 2011 5:07 am
Subject: Re: Speak up now about your use of EBCDIC or WE WILL REMOVE IT in a future release of Perl

On Mon, Oct 03, 2011 at 10:03:52AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> b: My hunch is that
>    i)  Craig is right - if all the EBCDIC related code were removed in one
>        (or few) clearly labeled the tools associated with git would make it

                                 ^ commits

oops.

I wonder if the rediff.com autoresponder is going to send me a reply for
both e-mails I sent. Hateful clueless thing.

Nicholas Clark


 
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