Re: [xml] OS/390 compatibility (EBCDIC)

[Alon Bar-Lev <alon barlev gmail com>]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com> wrote:
> ÂI would expect the compiler when being told to use ASCII to actually
> convert the part where it would clearly make a problem.

How can the compiler know which literal is used in order to parse utf content
and which to communicate with user/OS?

> I think the
> hardware and software stack you're using is expensive enough that as a
> customer you could ask it to be a bit smart when trying to cope with
> modern code.

Modern? libxml2 chose to convert stuff to UTF-8 then parse using local locale,
it is not an enforcement.

> ÂW.r.t. to error handling if you asume the error is being seen/analyzed
> on a OS/390 terminal, well condoleance ... even in 1990 the AIX 2.x or
> 3.x boxes next to it were much more frienly that most people preferred
> to use than the mainframe terminals.

This is untrue. I don't know what your experience with 3270, but it is
quite an advanced terminal, it works much better on slow communication,
it have full graphics support, and even mouse.
Anyway, this is not the discussion.

> ÂTo quote a colleague on the issue "it's seriously time for OS/390 to
> quit stealing time away from real development".

Sadly, OS/390 is used in most of the large scale enterprises. Ignoring it
is not wise.

> ÂIf you have a patch, I would carry it around as part of the tarballs
> but considering Fujitsu managed to solve the problem half a decade ago
> for their usage, I think something is doable without completely
> revamping the core code.

The simplest thing you can do is to separate between the parsing
and the strings, so that convlit=ISO8859-1 can be used on these specific
sources.

Anyway, I am moving to mxml now, I succeeded to make it work properly.

Regards,
Alon Bar-Lev.