I seem to have blown it again!!!!! Darn email! I somehow missed the responses to my topic. I see now that I didn't word my note correctly.
IBM didn't refuse to fix anything -- we never opened an incident. Emil Chan, here, has MANY irons in the fire so he merely sent an email to someone at IBM, and got back that response as an OPINION as to what would happen if he DID open an incident. What IBM said was "I will open a development report to see if that can be visited in the next release and maybe changed." That was the last line of the paragraph I copied into the note I posted. I goofed badly by accidentally leaving that sentence out. My apologies to everyone and especially to IBM! We decided to accept the development report, rather than open an incident, because we have so many other problems we are working on. I thought the quickest way to get the word out about the problem was to put it up here. Anyone who thinks that this should be fixed by an APAR in the current release -- please open your own incident. I know IBM counts how many times a given problem is reported in deciding whether to call something HIPER and whether to ship it in an RSU. (I don't know if the counts have any effect on how they choose to close an APAR.) If I get beat up badly enough in this forum, I will open one, too -- but frankly, we're not going to be bitten by this again anytime soon. I do value your opinions, though! > >Wow. Let me go put a 45 on the turntable and fire up my Dodge Aries. Because last time I saw a response this boneheaded from IBM on something that's so obviously a bug, those were current items! > >So, let's review: you issue a command, which produces errors because the syntax is invalid, but performs some random action based on finding a token in the command string that it recognizes. The error arrives via reader file, and you, being a smart fellow, immediately realize that "netstat cp" was invalid, so you don't even look at the error file. Or you look at it, and miss the fact that *in an error file* it says "Yeah, I did this" (when normally, a "netstat obey trace" just says "Yup, I did that" on the console). And this is considered normal, because someone blew it when they designed that function. > >I've had code that was "designed" to PROG1 when you type bad inputs -- but that didn't make it a good idea. > >I'm all for not making changes via APAR that are incompatible, but given that: >1) TCP/IP is an essential system service in this day & age >2) TCP/IP is already far too easy to break (those of us who work thousands of miles from our system consoles are particularly sensitive to this fact!!!) >3) The format DOES produce an error -- not just an ephemeral message, but a reader file -- something that will need dealing with eventually, if someone IS using this behavior deliberately > >it would seem to me that anybody who is depending on that behavior is going to (a) be hard to find and (b) even if (s)he exists, isn't likely to complain. > >I'd thus suggest that this stance is not defensible, and ask IBM to revisit it. Loudly. > >...phsiii (feeling younger, remembering the Bad Old Days when IBM would respond like this frequently, recalling arguing "all means all", when some long-forgotten command was documented as returning "all" of something and wasn't...) >========================================================================
