Re: Failure running gnulib-tool update on z/OS

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Mike Fulton wrote:
> I am attempting to bootstrap m4 on z/OS which uses gnulib-tool.

We need to distinguish two concepts: The development platform and the
target platform.

* The target platform is the type of system where the collected C code is
  being run. Gnulib attempts to support a lot of target platforms.
  See [1] for more info about the target platforms.

* The development platform is the type of system where 'git clone',
  'gnulib-tool', 'automake', 'autoconf', 'gperf' etc. are being run.
  Not all target platforms are usable as development platforms:
    - embedded systems, due to lack of memory,
    - native Windows platforms, due to trouble with file names and path names,
    - platforms with an absent or deficient /bin/sh, such as Android and
      Solaris 10.

Note: The C compiler is sometimes used on the target platform, sometimes
on the development platform.

z/OS is not even listed among the supported target platforms [1], because no
one is regularly running the Gnulib test suite on this platform. But with
some effort (especially to resolve the pervasive ASCII vs. EBCDIC problems on
this platform) there is a possibility that it could be got working.

Using z/OS as a development platform, OTOH, requires decent ports of the
development tools. Your mail seems to indicate that /bin/sh is a major stumbling
point. Another one will likely be gperf (which assumes ASCII).

Therefore my recommendation is to use a GNU system as development platform
and z/OS as target platform only. This means, create a tarball of sources
on the GNU system and compile it on the target platform.

Bruno

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Target-Platforms.html