On 4/12/2013 11:55 AM, John Gilmore wrote:
Richard Peurifoy has been lucky, and perhaps others have been too, but the basic difficulty remains. The use of these fields is undocumented, in fact unpoliced, and thus also unwise.
As a long-time user of both CVTUSER and TCBUSER, I have to disagree. These fields are in write-protected storage, giving the installation absolute control over their use. Some years ago, prior to IBM's adoption of the vendor table, I went to a conference. During my absence the local CA salesman, who happened to be golfing with the company president, talked him into doing performance measurement on our MVS system. One of my systems people installed their software; nobody noticed that we were no longer collecting accounting data, or printing billing information on the jobs. Since then I place eye-catchers in control blocks, and check for their presence. Some diligence after installing new software suffices to keep things safe. We had no problems with vendor software after the vendor table was introduced, and the only conflicts remaining tend to come from some CBT and similar software, most of which offers source, so can be checked. I'm not sure where luck comes into this. Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont
