Phil Smith wrote: <snip>
In z/VM this stuff is pretty rigorous. In z/OS, not so much. Yet due to SMP/E the need for a unique component ID is clear even for vendor stuff. How many VM ISV products use an assigned ID? Not many that I can think of. Some/many/most use *an* ID, but was it assigned by IBM?
This has little to do with SMP/E, actually, and more to do with avoiding inadvertent naming collisions, particularly in concatenations and things like them. At the time (O)SMP was created, z/OS UNIX did not exist, nor did the notion of same-named parts in different directories in the same file system selected by different environment variables or other means that render the duplicate names irrelevant. Naming collisions that happen by accident rarely produce good results. The original designers just added some rigor to make them harder to create, and that is also the root reason for the corporate standard we have today.
We have a lot more relief in the z/OS topology these days, and more variations to account for.
Any minute now, someone will probably jump in to say those designers should have foretold the future more accurately and designed something completely flexible that would work with things yet to be invented, but let's face it: Sometimes our crystal ball is cloudy. As Yogi Berra and Neils Bohr are both famously thought to have said, "Prediction is hard, especially about the future."
Also, SMP/E does nothing to prevent naming collisions when you install products having them in different zones. For example, it used to be the case (and might still be) that there are both MVS and IMS macros named WTO. With MVS products in one zone and IMS products in another, and the very different contexts in which "WTO" was or is used, it appears that this is not a problem.
And, yes, names like WTO and SYS1.LINKLIB, and many others, are "grandfathered" exceptions to the naming standard we use today.
-- John Eells IBM Poughkeepsie [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
