Perfect is the enemy of good. (Attributed to Voltaire, Confucius and others.)
Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Cheryl Watson Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2016 3:52 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Comments in SYS1.PARMLIB Hi Ed, Regarding "Letting IBM off with variations is nonsense.", I choose to think of it as being pragmatic. I can complain all day about how IBM's reduction of staff is hurting the mainframe, but the fact is that they are doing it despite anything I might say or do. Believe me that putting people to work on implementing "/" and "*/" in each parmlib member is NOT going to make it into the line items for a new release with higher priority work and reduced staff size. Before I wrote up the requirements, I did a thorough study of the Parmlib members and found that about half allow '*' in the first position. Because different departments work on each Parmlib member, I had to write up a separate requirement for each one, and it would have taken years (if ever) to get them all changed. Then Peter Relson, who wears many hats and is trusted by everyone in IBM, offered to do all the coding if he could implement the '*' version because, obviously, it's the least amount of coding (if a = '*' then bypass). I said that it would meet my requirements, the MVSE Requirements committee agreed, and he had it done a week later. If we had forced IBM to do it the "right way", it wouldn't be done today. At least now there is an option to put comments in the Parmlib members that didn't have them. And as my first email suggested, I think it would make a lot of sense for people to add a comment box at the top of every Parmlib member that includes not only an example of comments, but provides a place to put comments. You can save newbies a lot of trouble (and down time) in the future. I think this is just one of many compromises that we'll need to make with a reduced IBM staff, but I'd rather work within the system and get some things accomplished. (I could only wish our political parties could do the same.) ;-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
