zowe.yaml file requirements

[pablocarle]

Is your request for enhancement related to a problem? Please describe.

In customer installations I noticed that if the zowe.yaml file is tagged in an EBCDIC variant (IBM-1146 for example) the installation (zwe install) will fail due to not being able to parse the file.
Even if the file is readable, and the file is in a mainframe-native encoding.

The error message that will appear in such a case can be misleading, as it initially complains only about a missing dataset.prefix setting in the zowe.yaml.

Describe the solution you'd like

Zowe Docs should indicate the required features this file should have:

• zowe.yaml has to be encoded in EBCDIC and the file must be untagged, or tagged in IBM-1047 codepage)

Related doc pages

Probably https://docs.zowe.org/stable/appendix/zowe-yaml-configuration/ but it could be also during installation, if it's going to be done manually. If the zowe.yaml is created in z/OSMF workflows it probably doesn't have this issue happening, but it's not verified.