On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 05:08:41PM -0600, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> And I'm adding a cc to perl-mvs (just like I did back in September)
> since one thing that earlier thread demonstrated is that while no one
> on perl5-porters is admitting to knowledge of or access to z/OS, there
> are people on perl-mvs who are currently running Perl on that platform
> and would like to see that capability continue even if they can't
> currently contribute to making it happen themselves. They are the
> biggest stakeholders in this, after all, though perhaps some of them
> were satisfied with IBM's answer that if IBM decides a current port is
> needed, IBM will do it.
I don't know if IBM are different from Microsoft, Apple or Google, but
but generally when it comes to "bigcorp", one doesn't have a good
negotiating position if "bigcorp" decides something that doesn't fit
with your own needs (or survival requirements)
> I'll just note in addition that in the early stages of a renewed
> porting effort, domain expertise may well be more important than Perl
> expertise. Getting a build environment set up, flinging the Perl
> sources at it, examining the broken pieces for clues about what to do
> next, and so forth, will likely go for several rounds before one gets
> very deep into Perl's innards. Of course both Perl and z/OS expertise
> would ultimately be required.
But, really, there's no *requirement* for the initial individual(s) to do
the entire hit.
Right now, someone with just z/OS domain knowledge of "how to build things",
how to navigate around the file system, what the local equivalent of "cd",
"less" and "diff" are would get a long way. Just being able to report back
with build failure output would let everyone else solve the initial problems,
and get things to a much better state than they are now.
This would be a heck of a lot better than what we have now, which is a lot
of effectively dead code, some of which is actively getting in the way of
progress. And there's an easy option on that, which no-one on the perl-mvs
list would like, but if nothing else changes, it's going to be the only
solution left on the table.
Please don't all step backwards at once*
Nicholas Clark
* Can't find an image, but it's the 4th bullet point on this list
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GotVolunteered
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