The problem I see is that (currently), you can't use it to get a copy of z/OS to test how it will work, until 2.5 is released later in the year. Then, after it is released, just a few months later, the ability to download the "old" serverpac way will be completely removed.
That's very short-sighted. First, we have no way of testing that it will work at all right now, and when it does "work" we will only have a very short number of months to fall back to the old serverpac method. It would make far more sense to have 2.5 be the blended release, where you can do one way or the other for the entire release. Most sites have a policy against the "bleeding edge" of getting software, and what will end up happening with this current plan is that people will "grab a copy" immediately, that they have no intention of installing for quite a while, and then are faced with a scenario where they will install a year-old distribution and try to make it current with maintenance. Further, people who are running something lower than z/OS 2.3 (or 2.2, and there are quite a few still below 2.1), will have no easy way of upgrading without going the two step process of installing a driver system and using that. The installation path via that driver is unnecessarily convoluted. It's bad enough that 2.5 will no longer support anything older than a z13, but this new change in installation method presents a very difficult installation path in many ways. I'm not entirely sure that whoever puts these things together at IBM has really thought about how things are done in the "real" world, or maybe they are too young to remember IBM's commitment to providing a easy" upgrade path. Part of an "easy" upgrade path is not dropping a bomb in the middle of the computer center and walking away to let others have to clean it up. (I had a different word than bomb originally, so please don't complain about the "bomb" part). Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
