Phil,

You'll get no disagreement from me that Easter Egging is a valid approach when 
nothing else makes sense.  That was one reason I put in "in the more general 
sense".  I wasn't trying to imply that you were doing something wrong with your 
debugging, just giving an explanation of the term.  If anybody took offence to 
my definition, I apologize.

I wouldn't classify placing WTOs in a program an example of Easter egging.  :-) 
 When that's all you have to illuminate where the problem is occurring, it's a 
perfectly good technique.

Rex

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of Phil Smith III
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2015 11:23 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: RACF POSIT follies

Pommier, Rex wrote, on IBM-MAIN, in response to "What is 'Easter Egging'?":

>Easter Egging in the more general sense is trying to fix something by
randomly replacing elements when you don't have any idea what to fix and
hoping you get the right thing.  Based on the custom in various parts of the
world of hunting for Easter Eggs.

 

>Also known as shotgun debugging.

 

That's an accurate description, but has a negative connotation that I'd
defend against. When you've exhausted the normal approaches to something,
changing things that should have an effect-just not one that's expected to
fix the problem-is often illuminating. As in this example. We had started
with all the right approaches; they were just fruitless because the display
was lying to us. 

 

Putting a WTO in a program when you can't tell where it's ABENDing (and
don't have proper tools to debug it otherwise, obviously) is even an
example: "Ah, ok, we put out that message before the S0C1, so we did get
THAT far."

 

Elardus suggested:

> That class was probably a dynamic class and Vanguard was perhaps not
updated/upgraded to pick it up?

 

Well, a followup from Vanguard suggests:

"it is possible that someone has defined the CADB2 entity in the static
Class Descriptor table as well as the Dynamic CDT and the Dynamic CDT always
gets checked first."

Not sure whether this addresses that or not.

 

And no, the POSIT wasn't in the IBM range. I'm going to see if the customer
has time to run LISTCDT.

 

.phsiii


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