[CentOS] COBOL

Wed May 21 19:40:28 UTC 2008
Bill Campbell <centos at celestial.com>

On Wed, May 21, 2008, Scott Nelson wrote:
>On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 13:47 -0500, Michael wrote:
>>Just curious, maybe some old timers could help me out. I am working  
>>with
>>a company that is migrating 20 years of Mainframe Software Development
>>to Unix, HPUX. How much harder would it be to go to Linux, Centos  
>>Linux?
>
>Probably not hard at all -- I can't imagine a cobol compiler/runtime/ 
>executable needing anything in HP/UX that isn't in Centos (or any  
>other Linux for that matter).  The bigger problem is getting the COBOL  
>vendor to port to the version of Linux you want, Centos in this case.
>
>>[...] anyone have any experience with Fujitsu Cobol on Centos?
>
>I have not, but we do use AcuCOBOL version 4 from AcuCorp which was  
>recently bought by MicroFocus (they are up to version 8 now: 
>http://www.microfocus.com/products/extend/ )

It's been years since I did serious work on COBOL, originally on
Burroughs Medium Systems, then Ryan McFarland, and most recently
Microfocus.  The biggest problems I have seen recently with COBOL
run times is that they were built on old libc5 with calls to
errno which broke on recent versions of CentOS, and SuSE Linux
Enterprise 9/10.  The workaround on these was a couple of lines
in the startup scripts:

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL

Bill
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