I never meant this to be top of the list for IBM Development. There are more
pressing issues, of course. But it just annoys me that in this day and age
(yes, I'll use that phrase) all we have to describe a minidisk using
whatever we want to put in there is a minidisk label (apart from address, of
course). Not to mention other devices that don't have that 6-character
luxury. Sooo 1960's, which may be a good thing (but so was Y2K, for my back
pocket).
I mean, what does TCP191 tell you? Is it TCPIP or TCPMAINT? I won't even go
to TC0191. And how many times did we forget to change the label after
changing the minidisk address? Q MDISK was invented because Q DISK couldn't
tell you enough and was possibly telling you the wrong thing. So why not
give us a bit more that we can change *at the same time* when we change
something in the directory?
I don't care if that "comment" or "device name" is in the directory or CP
gets it from somewhere else (but where else?). Not putting rubbish in those
comments would be just a matter of common sense which you can't rely on, but
if one wants to put something stupid like a URL of MP3 of disk spinning in
that field, so what? The advantage of being able to name a disk "CMS Apply
Level n" to a newbie (and even to me, considering a rate of my brain cell
depletion) overweighs that. And I can think of much worse ways of bloating
the directory like not using profiles where you can.
I would also like to see it added in CP DEFINE. Call it DEVDESC or DEVNAME,
or whatever.
One has to be careful though not to introduce an ambiguity in design, so
that applications and guest OSs of the future don't hijack it for their own
selfish purpose ("you can put anything in this field unless you use XXX, in
which case it has to be structured"). I'd hate to see "/LINUX SWAPFILE
MAKEONCE" or ";TCPIP MAILME WHEN DEAD" as device description. But that could
even be a feature, depending on your view. We already have RSCS...
Again, this is not very important, but could open some new doors in the
future and make our VM a bit more modern and palatable to newbies.
Ivica Brodaric
