Re: The Day the Music Dies (was: RE: backup spool file)

[James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Al Barsa wrote:

> You can always make a command parameter bigger.
>
> The problem is what do you do with fields for system output files.  The
> output file for DSPOBJD has three fields, ODCPVR, ODCVRM and ODPVRM which
> are all six bytes long.  If you change the length of these fields, this
> will cause logic in programs to break.

And Vern wrote:

> The SYSLVL parameter of RTVOBJD takes a 9-character variable. The format is
> VnnRnnMnn. But, as Al says, there are lots of places that use 6-character
> format - not the least being all the TGTRLS parameters, which are now
> defined as *CHAR-8.

Why use fixed lengths at all?  Make the VRM be a "string" that can be any 
length.  Heck, in linux you can even add your own custom tag to the "VRM" 
(i.e. something like 2.6.9-we_did_this) and all the tools handle it just 
fine.  Why couldn't the iSeries do something similar?

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw