Andrew Rowley wrote: On 31/08/2018 3:05 AM, Jerry Callen wrote:
> Everyone has to follow the convention, and on z/OS they LARGELY do. (Emphasis added) I rest my case. :-) > Source control is not a better solution, it is a solution > to a slightly different problem. Fair enough. > When using source control you STILL need to make sure that 2 people > are not updating the same file at the same time - it is just the > window that is smaller. On z/OS you could solve that with DISP=OLD (though that's not practical in all situations). I would argue that the right solution is to lock your critical datasets down tightly with SAF and automated procedures such that direct, uncontrolled updates become a firing offense. > When I have worked at larger sites, there might be 5-10 systems > programmers with changes scheduled for a weekend IPL. When the IPL was > confirmed, typically there were multiple people who needed to update > the same members of SYS1.PARMLIB. We did have manual processes to > coordinate updates (typically they were all funneled through a > designated person) but without that offline manual process it would be > likely that there were multiple people trying to update the same file > at the same time. This is precisely the situation where you want source control, with code review and a single controlled update. As others have noted, the "pull request" idiom used by systems like GitHub and BitBucket are ideally suited to this situation. Everyone puts their needed changes on a branch, the branches are merged, humans review the result, and ONE person or automated process deploys the change. > When I heard about git for z/OS my first question was can it handle > z/OS datasets like SYS1.PARMLIB, answer: no. Sure it can, just not in the obvious manner. You have to be willing to stop treating the PDS as the "repository of record" and instead treat it as a deployed resource. Your git server becomes the canonical reference, and you update the PDS (via an automated process) when changes are merged into the "master" branch by that server. > We are where we are - it is important that existing functions continue > to work as expected. So, please, make Zowe edit compatible with ISPF > edit serialization. I think the proposals by Matt Hogstrom and Kirk Wolf solve the same problem in a better way. I don't think Zowe should perpetuate a practice that, IMO, is actually broken. > Do other platforms really use source control for everything? How many > unix systems have you encountered where /etc is under source control, > people have their own copies and merge changes into the real /etc? Any? Not to air dirty laundry, but some places I've worked have done this, others not. :-/ In any case, it's not unheard of, and becoming the norm. What I keep coming back to is this: we now have better tools for system management. Why WOULDN'T we use them? It won't happen overnight, but this is surely the direction we should be heading. -- Jerry ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
