Development status update

[Abe Kornelis]

All,

Last Monday we had another developers meeting.

I was quite happy seeing a good number of people gathered
for the meeting. It was nice seeing each other and discussing z390.

Git status:
-----------
the repository is loaded and available. It contains the code
history up to and including Don's latest release V1.7.06.
The repository can be found on github at z390development/z390.

The issue list is up-to-date as well now.
We migrated and labelled all open issues from our RPI list.
If you're interested, please do feel free to browse both
the repository and the issue list on github.

Anthony gave us a lot of information about github and the
way it works. We all need some time to get used with
the way github works.

zVSAM status:
-------------
Melvyn gave an update on his work for zVSAM.
He's reached an important milestone completing the
maclib changes to fully support transparency with regard
to zVSAM macros and control block structures.
I.e. even though these control block layouts are vastly
different it will take no code changes - the zVSAM(n)
option (which defaults to 1) determines which version
of the ACB/RPL/etc. are generated during assembly.
It also controls which version of the zVSAM support
gets invoked during execution.


Melvyn has also provided a regression test set in a
separate directory.

I gave an update on progress of coding zVSAM V2
open code in the java layer. The code is in place for picking
up an ACB, locating the file and opening it, then read the
first Block of the file - the Prefix Block.
Code to validate all this is still under construction.
Next steps include retrieving the catalog entry and
validating ACB and Prefix data against the catalog.

Melvyn remarked that the IBM open/close macros
contain a bug: if you code one of them with MF=L
and subsequently change on the MF=E using more
ACB/DCB entries than on the initial MF=L you're
overlaying storage which is an error.
We agreed to change the open/close parmlist as
used in z390 to prevent this by adding a halfword
count to it.

Scripting
---------
John Ganci told us about the changes he applied to
the bash and bat script files, plus some associated
java code changes. Jim Thomas has tested these.
After that John applied more changes. Jim indicated
he'd be happy to test these changes as well.

Next release
------------
Finally we discussed the current work on the next
release. We're aiming to complete all the directories
so that z390 is again complete and up-to-date.
Don and Jim are working on this.

All changed sources will go into the repository before
creating the next distribution. Anthony will work with
Don to run the RT suite and create the distribution file.
Then, after the distro is released, we can try to
automate the RT and build process as much as possible.

Stay safe and happy programming to all of you!

Kind regards,
Abe
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