zopen community quarterly digest - Spring 2025

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

Hi zopen community!

We have a new wave of updates to share! We've had a lot of great activity in this quarter from introducing new tools to strengthening our core utilities and package manager.
A big thank you to our dedicated contributors and collaborators for making this possible!

New Tools!

We've significantly expanded the zopen list of tools this quarter, bringing more of your favourite open source tools to z/OS:

• neovim: A Vim-based text editor with better extensibility and usability. Thank you @sachintu47 !
• procps: Utilities for monitoring system processes (currently includes pgrep, pkill, pmap, watch).
• redis: The popular in-memory data structure store. Thank you to the RCOS university students for this contribution!
• hexcurse: An ncurses-based hex editor.
• librabbitmq: A client library for AMQP. Thank you to @mgrossman for this contribution!
• spdlog: A very fast, header-only C++ logging library. Thank you @sachintu47 !
• fzf: A general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
• git-sizer: Computes various size metrics for Git repositories. Thank you @sachintu47 !
• lzip: A lossless data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm.
• cpio: Utility to copy files to and from archives. Thank you @HarithaIBM !
• bc: An arbitrary precision calculator language.
• uucp: Classic Unix-to-Unix Copy tools for file transfer and command execution. Thank you @sachintu47 !
• ed: The standard GNU line-oriented text editor. Thank you @sabi789 !
• util-linux: Added new utilities such as hexdump. Additional tools such as more are coming soon. Thank you @sachintu47 !

Use zopen install <package> to install these new packages!

Extending Core utilities for better z/OS support

Our coreutils package continues to improve with the following z/OS-specific enhancements:

• cat: Now includes -W (z/OS specific codeset options) and -B (disable automatic conversion) options.
• stat: Extended to display z/OS file tags and device names.
• ls: Adds -T (file tag) and -E (extended attributes) support to offer more detailed listings directly relevant to z/OS.

Use zopen upgrade coreutils to get these new updates.

zEDC Acceleration

We've also integrated zEnterprise Data Compression (zEDC) acceleration into the zip and gzip utilities, leveraging mainframe hardware capabilities for improved performance.

To learn more, check out our deep dive in Guild #18.

📦 Package Manager Updates

Managing your zopen tools just got easier with new subcommands:

• zopen info: Get detailed information about installed packages. For example, type zopen info vim to display information for the project vim.
• zopen usage: Provides space usage metrics for your zopen filesystem.
• zopen whichproject: Will help locate the origin of a specific tool managed by zopen. For example, type zopen whichproject pkill to locate the project pkill belongs to.
• zopen diagnostics: Helps us understand your zopen environment when reporting issues.
• Changelog Support: We've introduced initial changelog support (thanks @v1gnesh!), allowing releases to provide commit history. You can see an example in the latest coreutils release notes. We plan to display this changelog information directly within the zopen info output in a future update.

Use zopen upgrade meta to get these new updates.

🛠️ Tool Updates & Fixes

Keeping our ported tools up-to-date and stable is a constant effort. Numerous packages received updates and fixes this quarter. For a detailed list of changes, please check the "Newly Released" section on the zopen community website: https://zopen.community/#/newly_released

Notable updates include:

• rsync has been updated to 3.4.1, addressing the 6 critical vulnerabilities. To upgrade, run zopen upgrade rsync -y. Additionally, we’ve implemented functional fixes that previously prevented rsync from syncing files between z/OS and non-z/OS systems.
• iconv resolves several issues. Thanks @MikeFultonDev !
• gpg: GPG now correctly tags encrypted and signed files as binary.
• git: Git now correctly tags git's internal files under the .git directory. We've also added a performance consideration section in the README.md.
• unzip/zip: Several fixes, including restoring symbolic links and tagging the .zip file as binary

General Fixes

• Fixed an issue where empty untagged files were incorrectly identified as ASCII, which affected tools such as Vim. This could have caused garbled text when modifying an empty file in Vim.
• Fixes _ENCODE_FILE_NEW to ensure it does not interfere with internal file creation operations of tools like Git, GPG, and GN

🎓 University Collaborations

Our partnerships with universities continue to generate fantastic results:

• RCOS (Rensselaer Center for Open Source): Thank you to Kyle H and Aquiles for:

  • Successfully completing their semester, delivering the redis port and implementing two new features for the zopen package manager! Congratulations to the students!
    

• RVCE: Students are actively generating crucial data to help fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM) aimed at assisting with the porting of open-source software to z/OS. This innovative work could significantly streamline future porting efforts. See 1 and 2 for details.

🌐 Community Growth: OMP Ambassadors

We're excited to announce @HarithaIBM and myself are joining the Open Mainframe Project (OMP) as Ambassadors! This role allows us to further advocate for open source on Z, share the great work happening in the zopen community, and foster collaboration across the mainframe ecosystem.

IBM z/OS Open-Source Development, Test and CI/CD Pipeline Program

Need access to a z/OS environment to contribute to open source?
Launched in Q1 this year, the IBM z/OS Open-Source Development, Test and CI/CD Pipeline program offers access to a z/OS system specifically for the development and testing of z/OS open-source projects. We already have 11 users leveraging this program to help improve the z/OS open-source ecosystem and contribute back to the community. If lack of system access has been holding you back from contributing, consider this program!

👀 What's Coming Up Next?

We're already hard at work on the next wave of improvements:

• Revamped Package Manager: Get ready for major enhancements including mirroring support, significant performance improvements, and features enabling air-gapped installations.

More Tools!

• PostgreSQL: Work is underway by community members to bring this open-source relational database to z/OS.
• Libarchive: Adding support for this versatile library for handling various archive formats.
• gas2asm: Convert gcc -S output to HLASM input.

Community engagements

• Engagement PES university: @HarithaIBM will be engaging with 12 students across 3 different projects from AI to package management. We look forward to the collaboration!
• GSE UK Register for GSE UK at https://conferences.gse.org.uk/2025V. It is a free virtual conference, where we plan to talk about how to leverage the zopen community tools, how you can participate and contribute to the zopen community and how you can make the best use of Git on z/OS.

Get Involved!

The zopen community thrives on your participation! Whether it's trying out new tools, reporting issues on GitHub, contributing code, improving documentation, or sharing your experiences, your involvement makes a huge difference!

Best Regards,

The zopen Community Team