On Sat, 24 Dec 2011 09:45:12 -0500, John Gilmore wrote:
>Edward Jaffe wrote
>
><begin snippet>
>Recently, the need for eight-character TSO userids made it into the
>list of the highest ranked MVS SHARE requirements. Many installations,
>driven by their business units, are attempting to standardize on a
>single, eight-character, cross-platform userid. These attempts are
>being hampered by the arcane seven-character TSO userid restriction
>introduced in the 1970s.
></end snippet>
>
>Examples of this sort could be multiplied ad infinitum et nauseam. I
>have concluded that the only way around such infelicities is to make
>external-name size limitations much larger than life, to chose, say,
>the value 2^15 - 1 = 32767 characters for them and to make this value
>a design point even though it is not yet globally usable.
>
>Considerable work will have to be done to eliminate the
>seven-character TSO userid maximum, and it would be a work wasted if
>an already obsolescent eight-character maximum replaced it.
>
Yes. Particularly, TSO userids should be coded so the length is limited
only by the underlying OS, so that if MVS ever adopts more than 8,
TSO will immediately support that greater number with no recoding.
(or at most the minimal code change of redefining a single EQU used
globally).
Likewise, the TSO DSN prefix should be made larger than life so it
could immediately support up to 42 characters for legacy data sets,
and more if the underlying OS restriction is ever relaxed, and
immediately UNIX directory path.
Unix System Services already supports the USERIDALIASTABLE:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/bpxzb2b0/3.7.4.3
Would extending this facility to support TSO logins, and adding a
reverse lookup function provide short term relief of the SHARE
requirement. (One of the examplesin the cited section contains
an alias longer than 8 characters.)
-- gil
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