"*I would think that most product developers would create professional installer instead of using a quick and dirty solution.*" I prefer the terms clean, elegant and efficient. I've struggled with Rexx execs which do not quite do the job. It is fine if you want to follow a very narrow path. I've had to take the output of one of these scripts and change it because they were not best practice (didnt work for me) For example I use RACF RDATALIB to give specific control of keyrings. The rexx used FACILITY. I also want to review/edit the changes before making them (such as defining RACF resources). If you provide a set of ISPF panels, IBM rules say you have to provide them in several national languages (French, and Japanese to name two) which are very rarely used - as most people use the English ones
RACF changes need to be done by the security team - so now you have to get them to run the scripts etc. I remember one head banging z/OS product. I was asked to do a test of their configuration tool. The product was configured in Unix Services using sed, grep and bash scripts, then it was uploaded to PDSes. You then had to manually customise the PDS members. Slow, tedious etc it was too late to change before GA. I needed to change a configuration option, so I reran the customising tool as per documentation, It wiped out all of the PDS members and recreated them - losing all of my additional customising - so I've been burned in the past. In the next release this was dropped and a better configuration tool was created. I think it comes down to cost/benefit. Does the product manager want someone to spend two weeks of effort developing and testing a solution (and building regression tests for it) or spend the time doing something more useful. Sometimes ISPF panels is the right answer - many times simple JCL is best. Using the JCL solution may be better than saying in the documentation "edit all these files... and make the following changes". Or - more simply - it is horses for courses. Colin On Thu, 11 Jan 2024 at 02:00, Jon Perryman <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 10 Jan 2024 08:47:38 -0600, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> > wrote: > > >On Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:41:16 +0000, Colin Paice wrote: > > > >>I think all products should use this technique, instead of asking users > to > >>make the same changes to multiple files as part of configuration. > >> > >It's regrettable that there's no clean way to provide defaults. > Perhapsis onl > >another JCLLIB member. > > I would think that most product developers would create professional > installer instead of using a quick and dirty solution. z/OS has many tools. > ISPF Panels, models. Clists, REXX, TSO, IRXJCL, ISPF edit and more. It > doesn't take much to use ISPF panels, validate user input and set defaults. > Having customers modify JCL set statements is only useful for very simple > products. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
