Get CA Librarian and Panvalet source into Git — and finally into a real build
Librarian and Panvalet have safely stored your source for decades, but they were never build systems and never will be. We extract your members and their history, model them in Git, and add the impact-aware build these libraries never had.
A library is not a pipeline
CA Librarian and CA Panvalet do one thing well: they keep versioned source members, with archived deltas and a change history, inside a proprietary master file. That was modern in the 1970s and dependable ever since. But they are storage, not delivery. There is no branching, no dependency-driven build, and no promotion model — the member you check out is the member you compile, and working out what else that change affects is a manual exercise.
That leaves Librarian and Panvalet shops a step further back than Endevor shops. Where an Endevor migration is about preserving a promotion path, a Librarian or Panvalet migration is about gaining capabilities you never had: real version control, and a build that knows a changed copybook forces its dependents to recompile. IBM Dependency Based Build (DBB) provides exactly that — it scans your source to construct the dependency graph, recompiles what a change actually touches, and re-links statically bound load modules.
These are also among the oldest products in Broadcom’s CA mainframe portfolio, carried forward with minimal investment. The developers who knew them are retiring, and their replacements expect Git — not a ++INCLUDE and an ISPF library panel.
The migration, in five stages
Because there’s no promotion lifecycle to preserve, the hard part isn’t untangling process — it’s cleanly extracting decades of members and reconstructing the dependency knowledge the library never tracked.
Capabilities the library never offered
Impact-aware builds
A changed copybook rebuilds its dependents automatically — the analysis Librarian and Panvalet left entirely to the developer.
Real branching & review
Feature branches and pull requests replace member-level checkout, bringing mainframe changes into the same review discipline as the rest of your code.
One toolchain
Your z/OS source lives in the same Git, CI, and deployment tooling as everything else — no separate island only a shrinking group knows how to run.
Extracting clean source from a Librarian master file or a Panvalet library is its own craft. We’ve done it — and built the DBB pipeline on the other side, not just dumped members into a repo.
Tell us what’s in your libraries. We’ll tell you what moves first.
A migration assessment inventories your Librarian or Panvalet members and maps them against a Git + DBB model — no commitment, no generic sales deck.