Currently it's kind of the worst of both worlds. Some SMF records formats are in the SMF manual. Some are in one product-specific manual or another, with no consistency from product to product. There is a cross-reference in the SMF manual, but it sometimes lags reality.
Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mark Zelden Sent: Friday, January 03, 2014 11:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SMF (was: REXX tutorial) On Fri, 3 Jan 2014 12:35:44 -0600, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote: >On Fri, 3 Jan 2014 12:10:15 -0600, Ed Gould wrote: >> >>Interesting thing about SMF... >>For 20 years IBM documented SMF records in one consolidated place the >>SMF manual. >>In the last 5 or so years IBM did an about face and started to scatter >>them around in unlikely places WHY?????????????????? >> >My guess would be that the specification of the formats of SMF records >is owned not by SMF, but by the various utilities that generate them. >As such, it would be onerous, untimely, perhaps even error-prone for >each utility that adds a new SMF record type to require an update of a >central SMF data areas manual section. > Oh, you mean someone would have to do some work. :-) Seriously... I don't like the trend (although it isn't widespread). As long there is internal communication within IBM and everyone played by the same rules, the information could be kept consolidated in a single manual or kept in sync with the component / subsystem manuals. Same goes for operator commands (catalog / DFSMS manuals comes to mind). There is an overall owner of z/OS, so I suppose it would be up to them to dictate direction of keeping all the information in a single manual (or not) or keeping the information current in multiple manuals (although it would come at a cost as nothing is free and these decisions are made with the financial aspects in mind). One thing's for sure - complaining on IBM-MAIN won't do anything. -- Mark Zelden - Zelden Consulting Services - z/OS, OS/390 and MVS ITIL v3 Foundation Certified mailto:[email protected] Mark's MVS Utilities: http://www.mzelden.com/mvsutil.html Systems Programming expert at http://search390.techtarget.com/ateExperts/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
