by tbrennan » Sun 04 May 2014, 22:27
Thanks! I spent some hours on it today with fairly good results so far. I'm going to guess that nobody has tried to compile this code on MVS for about a decade, or if they did, Google can't find their notes and updates. The original source needed some minor changes, and the JCL needed some mods too. But the resulting programs under my id seem to work fine with my simple tests so far. One test showed the zip EBCDIC-ASCII conversion (something really important) didn't work at all and that surprised me. Looks like some code changes added in 2004 caused that bug, so I coded a workaround that effectively disables the new code. That by itself gives me a good clue that nobody has re-compiled this source for MVS in at least 10 years (unless they updated their own copy of the source and did not notify the Info-Zip folks).
So I'll test some more and make any more mods as needed, then I'll see if I can make a blog page or something that Google can find to show my notes to the next poor soul, and also try to contact the Info-Zip folks about changes needed for MVS.
By the way, Info-Zip touts itself as one of the most platform-independent programs out there, and if you look at the C code you can see why. It's simply covered with conditional compile statements (#ifdef, etc.) for various platforms. So I can totally understand how a change to one platform might be tested successfully, and still cause an error on another platform that is not compiled or tested as often.