Wow, you reminded me of SMP4, my first. Exclude lists! And what was
that option so it didn't read/write each PDS directory entry separately
and take all day? SMP/E was like a revolution. Great work by the
designers.
On 8/24/2023 12:05 PM, Seymour J Metz wrote:
Symbols?
SMP may not be perfect, but it's a lot better than what came before. SMP2,
SMP3, SMP4 and SMP/E were each an improvement, and SMP/E has itself evolved
significantly.
Perfect? Of course not. But still essential.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of
Phil Smith III [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2023 2:57 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Is SMP/E needed for installs?
I don't think SMP/E is evil, I think it's unfinished. As I wrote before, the
inconsistent support for symbols and the execrable error messages lead to tons
of wasted time, frustration, and hatred. Yet the actual concepts and
functioning are pretty cool-how often have you wanted to back off a Windows
patch? So sad, too bad, you applied it, your only option is a rollback to a
previous checkpoint, if you have one and can find it. Etc.
If it supported symbols consistently and someone paid attention to the errors
and made them more coherent, several things would happen:
1. Folks would make fewer errors
2. When they do make errors, they'd be able to say "Oh, right" and fix
them, rather than wasting hours
3. They wouldn't hate SMP/E as so many seem to
Since, aside from vendors like us with automated testing, SMP/E results are (I
think?) unlikely to be subject to automation, changing errors seems like it
would be pretty safe. Actually, since the errors ARE so grim, what testing
exists is, I expect, like ours: it looks for RC=0 (or 4, sometimes) and if it
doesn't get what it wants, punts to a human anyway!
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