On Mon, 20 May 2019 13:28:58 +0000, Sankaranarayanan, Vignesh wrote: >... in what ways are they similar, and what ways are they different? >Is the world better off with SMP/E-like structure for code, or is z/OS etc. >better off with Git-like structure? > I never learned Git. I've long seen similarities and differences between "make" and SMP/E:
Both build targets from sources and update those targets when the sources change (and both use the term "target"). SMP/E restricts names to 8 (or 7) characters, all uppercase. Make suffers no such archaic restriction. The only language processer SMP/E supports is Assembler. Make allows the user to define rules for processing any language. SMP/E should do likewise. Make infers element types from filename extensions. SMP/E supplies the element type in the element MCS. I prefer to use filenames only for identification, not to overload then with metadata as make does. SMP/E determines service level from PRE and SUP operands of SYSMODs; make relies on file timestamps. SMP/E's more orderly practice avoids a misbehavior when a target has been built later than the timestamp of a higher-level source. Make has a macro facility; SMP/E has none. That could be valuable for global specification of a DSN HLQ. (Use of the SYSLMOD LLQ to select a DDDEF is a small step in that direction.) The make product description is entirely in the makefile; SMP/E uses two sources, the UCLIN and the JCLIN. JCLIN seems to me to be transitional, allowing the user to import (mostly) existing JCL rather than needing to re-specify a product to import it to SMP/E. SMP/E's support of UNIX files is bizarre. The user seems required to use GIMDTS to transform UNIX files to FB80 PDS or instream elements, unload the PDSes with IEBCOPY to RELFILES, and package those. Even as IEBCOPY is the natural tool for PDSes, "pax -xpax" is the natural for UNIX files, and preserves all the peculiar z/OS metadata. SMP/E should adopt pax for transfer of UNIX files rather than the current convoluted process. (And everything that Joel said.) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
