On 9/9/2013 3:34 PM, Stone, Joel wrote:
I don't know how to argue better, except to say that all other platforms moved to multi-level path names in the 1960s or 1970s; OS400 is the only one with the single level of libs.
I gave some thought to your original scenario - making a test
environment by copying production to a subfolder. So I tried it. I
want to create a test environment for Internet Explorer. I copy the
\Program Files\Interner Explorer\* hierarchy to a subfolder of \Program
Files. I run that iexplore.exe and go into internet options and make
changes. Close and re-open my test environment iexplorer and all looks
fine. Then I open the production version and discover that it has the
same changes I just made in test!
The multi-tier folders made it pretty easy to make a physical copy, but
the application design itself needs to take advantage of that
architecture. On Windows at least, there's the registry and the various
nooks and crannies (including the single level \Windows\system32) where
the data and DLLs are stored which also need to be copied and then
re-configured for use in their new locations. It's not nearly as simple
as copy and go.
In fact, this issue of test/dev/production is such a convoluted issue on
desktop machines that it's way easier for me to fire up VM and create an
entirely new instance of the entire machine than it is to manually copy
directories and walk through the setup GUIs (there's rarely a simple
.ini file I can grep | sed and go with).
I like the flexibility of an n-deep directory structure but it's simply
not available for QSYS.LIB and I'm not going to spend a lot of energy
trying to redesign my applications to emulate it because I designed the
concept of test/dev/production into the library structure from the
start. Which is far more important than whether the VTOC can go down
more than one level deep.
--buck
midrange.com
