On Fri, 29 May 2009 18:22:11 -0400, Kurt Quackenbush wrote: >McKown, John wrote: >> Could I ask a question which I know you likely cannot answer. But, if >> possible, could you explain why the SMP/E Internet download stuff in >> SMP/E uses UNIX files to store the data rather than z/OS "legacy" >> type datasets (perhaps compressed with TERSE or XMIT'ed)? > >As a matter of fact I can answer that question. Mostly because the >download FTP servers and their file systems are not necessarily z/OS, >and non-z/OS systems do not typically play well with z/OS data sets. We >wanted to keep the package and file structure Internet-friendly >(platform agnostic?) so it wouldn't matter much what kind of system was >used to serve, or download. Remember, for those that cannot or choose >not to download directly to z/OS, we expect the package to be downloaded >to a workstation. In addition, we wanted to use a supported and >"standard" archive/compression utility. The UNIX pax command was our >choice. Therefore, UNIX files seemed like a good choice all around. > >I'm sure we could have made other choices, and I'm sure some folks on >this list will be more than happy to point them out to me. Be that as >it may, the format we landed on was and is UNIX files. It is >unfortunate you have to jump through hoops to get a set of volumes to >use for the download. Can you work with your storage admins to avoid >this in the future? > We've had similar complaints relayed from our customers. Fortunately, I can dispel them by saying we're following IBM's lead. Fortunately none of our products is so large as to encounter the multi-volume constraint.
There's a diachronic component: TERSE, perhaps not "standard" in the same sense as pax, is now supported, but it was not supported in the time frame in which IBM wanted to provide Internet delivery. XMIT is bulky. But IBM uses XMIT to deliver the Rational product suite. Both TERSE and XMIT are Internet-friendly. They can't be extracted on workstations (well, shareware (unsupported) exists for XMIT; I don't know about TERSE). But there's no need to extract on the workstations. That happens on the Z. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
