On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 08:26:48 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: > >No, the motivation was customer requests. I said to a customer sysprog "I >thought our IEBCOPY install was pretty good." He said "it's great, and SMP/E >is a pain in the [butt], but it's a consistent pain in the [butt]. Every >vendor's IEBCOPY install is unique." > Alas, this chaos resurfaces with RECEIVE FROMNETWORK/FROMNTS/ORDER. Many vendors haven't the administrative leverage to support FROMNETWORK even though IBM supplies the GIMZIP tool. z/OS is a fringe LoB to my employer who requires as a standard that every product and patch be supplied as a .zip file containing the payload plus a README.* containing installation instructions. I understand that IBM supplies products on optical media for customers unable to RECEIVE ORDER.
IBM supplies no instructions, much less a tool, for packaging for RECEIVE ORDER, and the antiquated Packaging guide fails to describe the optical media format in the detail in which it describes packaging for tape reels. >-----Original Message----- >From: Kurt Quackenbush >Sent: Friday, September 11, 2015 8:09 AM > >You can greatly simplify you and your customers' efforts if you can avoid MODs >and JCLIN altogether. That is, it is far simpler to package complete load >modules using PROGRAM elements rather than as individual MODs with JCLIN. >PROGRAM elements treat load modules as simple members of a partitioned data >set that can be copied and replaced. No JCLIN is necessary and no link edit >processing is performed by SMP/E. > The downsides of this are: o PTFs are enormous. At a recent release boundary, we switched to finer granularity packaging and our PTFs shrank by a factor of 10. o Dependency entanglements are aggravated. A customer may not be able to apply an APAR for a hot problem without bringing in all very recent unrelated service which that customer was waiting for his peers to field-test. (I think the term is "aging" PTFs before installation.) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
