I don't think SMP/E is evil, I think it's unfinished. As I wrote before, the inconsistent support for symbols and the execrable error messages lead to tons of wasted time, frustration, and hatred. Yet the actual concepts and functioning are pretty cool-how often have you wanted to back off a Windows patch? So sad, too bad, you applied it, your only option is a rollback to a previous checkpoint, if you have one and can find it. Etc.
If it supported symbols consistently and someone paid attention to the errors and made them more coherent, several things would happen: 1. Folks would make fewer errors 2. When they do make errors, they'd be able to say "Oh, right" and fix them, rather than wasting hours 3. They wouldn't hate SMP/E as so many seem to Since, aside from vendors like us with automated testing, SMP/E results are (I think?) unlikely to be subject to automation, changing errors seems like it would be pretty safe. Actually, since the errors ARE so grim, what testing exists is, I expect, like ours: it looks for RC=0 (or 4, sometimes) and if it doesn't get what it wants, punts to a human anyway! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
