Everyone has heard me say it before, but SFS is where the VM POSIX Byte
File System (BFS) lives. As we bring new functionality to the platform,
it often comes as a POSIX application, with LDAP being the most recent
addition to the stable. We cannot afford to port POSIX applications to
native CMS applications; it's too time consuming and the original authors
won't support it.
Where the issue is only config files on input (such as with MPROUTE) and,
say, log files for output, we are able to host the application in such a
way that we can redirect it to minidisk. But applications like the LDAP
server are not amenable to such treatment since these actually depend on
the hierarchical structure of the BFS. There is no minidisk-based
alternative for such applications. (The LDAP clients were hosted to
redirect to minidisk.) Nope, you don't have to deploy LDAP if you don't
want to. But over time the water will rise behind the dam. There is more
coming.
So while I appreciate the frustration of having to worry about SFS when
you haven't in the past, the time has come for us to exploit something we
introduced over 20 years ago in VM/SP Release 6.
Regards,
Alan
Alan Altmark
Sr. Software Engineer
IBM z/VM Development
