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Hi,
We are now involved in a process of modernizing our mainframe development factory. As such, we adopt source management to the Git standard, and we use the VS Code workshop and various extensions such as Zowe Explorer to manage them.
But not all of our sources are necessarily in text format. We also have sources that are in binary format. We come from a legacy mainframe source management tool. This historical tool managed binary sources: object modules, loadmodules without text source, or others.
Even if Git is not the ideal tool to manage binary files, we still chose to manage them in Git because it greatly simplifies our versionning, build and packaging procedures.
We needed to package some binaries in "xmit" format files to preserve their structure, via a TSO command "transmit/xmit" (which creates a "transportable" file without alteration, as long as it is managed in binary). TRANSMIT command.
The reverse of the TSO TRANSMIT command is the TSO RECEIVE command: RECEIVE command
We would like to have a viewer for these files in "xmit" format.
The format of "xmit" files is described in a Python library:
There are also free utilities available through the CBT Tape site:
At the very least, you would need a viewer allowing to navigate through the structure of an "xmit" file, and to browse the contained files, knowing that these files are encoded in EBCDIC, (we can be satisfied with an only EBCDIC codepage which would be IBM-037). Eventually, it would be necessary to be able to export a file contained locally (on the workstation), either in binary, or with an EBCDIC to UTF-8 conversion (which is the local encoding standard of Zowe CLI / SDK).
It may not be Zowe Explorer that should take care of all the operations on "xmit" files, but a couple Zowe Explorer and a dedicated Zowe CLI plugin: "xmit for Zowe CLI".
In the event of an "xmit for Zowe CLI" plugin, then one could also consider complete "xmit" file management operations by driving "transmit" and "receive" TSO commands from the plugin.