Charles Mills wrote:
The problem for me starts with the incredibly inconsistent titling, which
causes the manual titles to sort in no meaningful sequence, making it doubly
hard to find the relevant manual. Many of the IBM bookshelves have this
problem, but DFSMS is IMHO the worst.
Look at the list below and tell me "quick, which one of these manuals will tell you
how to use the IDCAMS utility to delete all members of a PDS(E)?"
z/OS DFSMS Software Support for IBM System Storage TS1130 and TS1120 Tape
Drives (3592) SC26-7514-04
<snip>
While I do recognize the problems (who wouldn't?), I must express
considerable sympathy for the writers and editors.
Why? They cannot win.
A comprehensive reorganization of the library could easily cause people
who are experienced in a particular area of the system to stumble about
for years while perhaps simplifying things for the less experienced in
any given area. At the same time, leaving things as-is keeps people who
know how to find what they need happier, perhaps at the expense of
people who do not.
However, the library's organization is not the only way to approach
things. The search arguement "z/os delete all members of a pds," which
I happened to try first on Google, yielded this URL at the top of the
results list (watch the wrap):
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r13/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.zos.r13.idak100%2Famspdse12.htm
The topic it points to is "Using the access method services DELETE
command to delete all members of a PDS or PDSE."
That same topic is the third hit with the second argument I tried, which
was "how do I delete all members of a pds?" It rises back to the top
with my third try, "how do I delete all members of a pds on z/OS?"
This is not meant to excuse anything, but it seems an effective coping
strategy that is reasonably independent of how we might choose to
organize the information. YMMV, of course.
--
John Eells
z/OS Technical Marketing
IBM Poughkeepsie
[email protected]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
