At 9/13/2006 01:30 PM, TMerchant wrote:
But why does it require that previously received maintenance be
REJECTed and that previously APPLY'ed maintenance be RESTORed?
Because our maintenance is cumulative, not incremental.
- That means that the latest maintenance file always
contains all maintenance, not just the most recent.
- That means that the file as a whole has to be APPLY'd to
the instance of the product that existed immediately
after initial install.
- That means that all prior maintenance has to be removed
before the new maintenance file can be successfully
APPLY'd.
- And that's what RESTORE and REJECT do.
- And that's why our canned maintenance JCL contains
RESTORE, REJECT, RECEIVE and APPLY, in that order.
In other words, the process is fully automated by a
single job.
Note, the only time our maintenance job fails is when the SYSPROG
does an ACCEPT of prior maintenance. Doing that prevents RESTORE from
reverting the libraries to their initial installation state (a state
which the cumulative maintenance file does NOT fit.)
But even that's not so bad, because it also is trivially easy for the
customer to recover simply by rerunning the initial installation
jobs, a process that, for our product, takes about 4 minutes.
As I said in my initial post, the advantage of cumulative maintenance
over incremental maintenance is that customers, when they eventually
get around to applying maintenance (a far less frequent event than I
would like), need only download the latest maintenance file. They
don't need to go scurrying around looking for older maintenance, and
I don't need to maintain the older maintenance as individual files.
Using a system in a way that was never envisioned by the creators
can be brilliant innovation. It can also be what is termed "gaming
the system"...
Well said
I prefer to call it, simply, a good idea.
Dave Cole REPLY TO: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cole Software WEB PAGE: http://www.xdc.com
736 Fox Hollow Road VOICE: 540-456-8536
Afton, VA 22920 FAX: 540-456-6658
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