See below.
Patrick O'Keefe wrote:
As part of an ESP I'm giving feedback on the product's SMP process.
I complained that UNIT and VOLUME weren't needed on DDDEFs if the datasets
were cataloged (and that their sample allocation job cataloged them).
I was told that IBM's product packaging rules require UNIT and VOLUME on
all DDDEFs.
Is that true?
Well, in the current ones, UNIT is explicitly required, and since
you cannot specify UNIT without VOLUME...
If so, how do most shops deal with this? For years I've
just removed the UNIT and VOL parms. Is there another way? I can't tell
from the fine manual whether VOLUME() is valid and haven't tried it yet.
Nor have I tried putting in an SMS-managed volid and hope that SMS changes
it as needed. Would that work?
In most DDDEF jobs, UNIT and VOLUME are on separate lines that
are not the last lines in the ADD DDDEF command. So you should
be able to:
"X UNIT( all"
"X VOLUME( all"
"F // all" (just to be safe ;-)
"DELETE ALL X"
...and be done. (You could even put this into an EDIT macro, I
suppose, but I'd probably be able to type these commands faster
than I could recall what I named the macro unless I were doing
this really often.)
However, note that:
- ServerPac does not use the sample DDDEF jobs and will give you
the choice between DDDEFs with or without UNIT and VOLUME. Given
that most products are installed using ServerPac these days
(though by no means all), dealing with product-supplied DDDEF
samples is almost an exception process.
- There is some validity to the position that UNIT and VOLUME on
DDDEFs is good. For one thing, it prevents you from updating the
in-use LINKLIB. Also, a quick ZEDIT can set the DDDEFs for an
active SYSRES to something like VOLUME(NOSUCH) so that setting
the wrong zone for an APPLY step will not update the running system.
- Product packagers will probably not be terribly responsive to
requests to add a non-UNIT/VOLUME version of the DDDEF job. It's
taken a Long Time to get it reasonably well-standardized, and
testing two of them increases cost without adding much value.
But if you feel strongly about this, by all means submit a
requirement.
<snip>
--
John Eells
z/OS Technical Marketing
IBM Poughkeepsie
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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