On 20/11/2025 9:20 am, Jerry Whitteridge wrote:
Reading Andrew's reply I'd like to point out that when I was selecting software
products the availability of having a SMPe install and maintenance process
weighed heavily in the choices I made as it meant much better controlled (and
documentable) maintenance processes. The fact that IBM now delivers pre built
SMPe doesn't change the fact that after install maintenance is back to
Apply/Accept and pre-reqs/co-reqs.
I would disagree about better controlled. Unless you only apply only RSU
maintenance with no additions or subtractions, or the vendor delivers a
full replacement every time, the number of possible combinations of PTFs
that can be applied means you are almost certainly running a combination
that has never been tested by the vendor. How do you even answer the
question of what maintenance level you are on? A list of all PTFs?
I did installation of IBM and 3rd party software for a long time. The
only vendor who consistently had their act together with SMP/E was IBM.
Other vendors had a tendency to do weird things, like send PTFs without
any pre-reqs for previous maintenance and tell you to just bypass any
errors etc. 3rd party software was much better when it was non-SMP/E.
Or we ran into problems like:
"Help! We need to apply this PTF urgently, but we discovered that some
of the DDDEFs point to a previous version of the product which we
cleaned up 3 months ago, and the apply job fails. How do we fix it?"
"So for all previous maintenance, updates were spread across old and new
libraries? The new libraries don't contain some parts of the
maintenance, and/or the new libraries contain components built partially
from the old version? The target zone libraries don't contain a
consistent version of the software and they don't match what is in the
CSI? I don't think you can reliably fix it. I'd recommend reinstalling
from scratch."
(For the record, reinstalling was rejected and they just changed the
DDDEFs, applied the maintenance and pretended it didn't happen. Let the
vendor figure it out from the dump if it fails!)
Confusion about what is being referenced and updated is particularly
common for components in the filesystem rather than MVS datasets.
So I'm not a fan of SMP/E for SMP/E's sake. If you need and use its
features, fine. If it's just a box to tick, it just creates extra work
for the vendor and the customer, and lots of ways to screw things up.
--
Andrew Rowley
Black Hill Software
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