Thank you for the detailed response!
to not only port the fundamental tools to z/OS, but also to do it completely in the open. We create one 'port' repo for each
Open Source package and the repo contains information on compiler options, dependencies, and so forth so that anyone
can (relatively easily) build the software.
We also have a special repo (meta) that has a rudimentary package manager and build tool that we use
(e.g. _zopen install_ to install binaries, _zopen build_ to build from source, etc.).
We have indeed moved to a 'UTF-8 first' model, which for the most part is a 'ISO8859-1 first' model and we have a
special OS library that takes care of edge case conversions to EBCDIC (and provides a couple functions that are missing).
This is also Open Source (zoslib).
We have about 80 packages we are porting / have ported. Some are very far along like gnu make and Perl with many
fixes upstreamed. Some are just barely building - htop is probably a good example of one we have just started on.
I am also not sure if we want to work in UTF-8 or in ISO-8859-1. My goal would be UTF-8 across the board, but
I expect there are things we still need to fix to get there. Our vim port seems to work well with UTF-8 but I'll be honest
that the testing of that is sparse still.
With all that background, I'm wondering if 'both' is the right answer? Would others also find it valuable to be able to
have the mathematical angle brackets in UTF-8 be transliterated to angle brackets in ISO8859-1? If so, perhaps a
'starter fix' would be if I worked with the libiconv folks to see if that can be added (I opened a similar question in the
libiconv channel since honestly I'm not sure the best way to fix this). In parallel, I think I need to understand how I
could change the way I build man so that it operates in UTF-8 mode.
Thanks, Mike