Re: How comments treated by DIRMAINTThere is actually a tool that does a fair job of recreating the source directory from the object directory. It actually won't put PROFILEs back in, or INCLUDEs, or comments, but can put all object parts back to their source equivalents. The DIRENT tool (in the VM download packages) does this, though when I last looked, it wasn't up to date. I maintained it locally to provide what was missing. Alas, I no longer have access...
The nice thing about this tool for me was for viewing of several reference systems (and for disaster recovery and a few other cases). A frontend exec took a parameter for which system I was curious about, linked to the disk with the desired DRCT space, and displayed in XEDIT whatever "source" I wanted. DIRENT was most often used on a particular USER, but it had the option to view/rebuild the entire DRCT. Reading the object directory was fast and there was no need to wait for a maybe busy DIRMAINT to return a GET, no spool space taken up, no temporary clutter in my reader, especially, no need to even bring up the second level system; just show me what I want. It is possible to see the first level from the second level, given a RR link back upward. Or sideways. Security and outdatedness (though not sure where it stands now) aside, a nice tool. I agree about no purpose for comments in the object directory. The audience for querying the directory seems small, just system programmers, who can get to comment/informational references some other way. General users on our system never needed to see comments. Oh, well, we had an elaborate frontend to DIRMAINT that provided users the same thing, as part of billing information that they entered when they requested their own minidisks! But this data wasn't stored in the source directory, and querying was built into that frontend. And system disks were never considered or treated like user minidisks. Two tools for two audiences is OK. Now, if IBM were to add a versatile frontend to DIRMAINT, that could be useful. All kinds of metadata COULD be useful for different sites. But I imagine that SFS features and declining use of VM by end-users would reduce the market for such a tool. (Actually, the billing-oriented tool was built before the DIRM SAPI interface, which would have made it easier.) I imagine that an ESM could be a good place to store metadata (some is already). And maybe Accounting packages could be integrated with the ESM to use the metadata. So maybe a vendor could run with this, and IBM can develop what they see as more strategic to VM. On 2/11, RPN01 said... <snip> Second, someone mentioned comments taking space in the object directory... My impression / hope would be that comments would be stripped from the information before building the object directory, since there is no actual purpose for them there, and there isn't a convenient tool to take an object directory and turn it into a source directory. Are the comments actually left in the object directory? If so, MAINT is one of the worst offenders, leaving in the hundreds of links that it uses during the installation as comments. <snip>
