I remember that clearly, and I believe Mitch and I are referring to the same ISV (I know we both worked there, but at different times). We had a developer encounter behavior in the JCL that differed from the documentation, and he reported it to IBM. IBM fixed it so that it agreed with the doc, but from that point on we had to have a setting in our configuration file for customers to tell us whether they had that fix on or not (we weren't installed with SMP/E). The lesson was "for Pete's sake, don't REPORT the discrepancy or we'll have to support it BOTH ways!".
Rich Way -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mitch Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 1:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: JCL Paul: You are exactly right. That is what IBM would tell us as a vendor, but then we had to turn around and support our customers because it was an "undocumented feature" of the IBM JCL processing environment. Made new releases of both our product and operating systems upgrades from IBM all the more interesting when all of a sudden we were not in synch again. I recall a couple of instances where one of these features worked, then IBM made a change and it didn't work, then a couple of years later, it was back. .....always fun. Mitch -----Original Message----- From: Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> To: IBM-MAIN <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Nov 8, 2013 1:27 pm Subject: Re: JCL On Fri, 8 Nov 2013 16:07:37 -0500, Mitch wrote: I have done support for automated JCL management tools for the past 30+ years nd it is amazing the number of "features" in JCL that are not documented in the BM JCL reference manual. It was difficult dealing with clients who would tell s they had coded something in their JCL, yet there was no mention of it being a apability. .....made it difficult sometimes to keep up! believe IBM's rule (stated in one or more cases) is that if it ain't ocumented t ain't supported; it ain't predictable; it ain't stable; and it ain't uaranteed o stay how it is in the next release, PUT, or even PTF. Of course the customer is always right, and even IBM listens to sufficiently ig customers. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- or IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, end 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
