Re: Regarding retrieving source from modules

Eric wrote:
>I agree that this does nothing for the poor soul who does not plan ahead
but
>I also know that feces occurs... It is always nice to have yet another way
>to get at that all important information. Sort of like the department of
>redundancy department :-)  And being able to see (And source debug from
the
>object is rather nice!)

I certainly have experience with "feces" myself.  Many years ago I
accidentally entered the command "del *.*" on a directory of source
files, twice in one week!  (After the first time, I rebuilt the FAT
manually, the 2nd time, I restored a backup and retyped a few
changes.)  But that was on my own system and the only one put out
was myself.

Reduncancy is nice, but is still no substitute for proper procedures
to begin with.

>
>In the past there have been products ie. Golden Retriever. That would
>attempt to reconstruct the source from the program object... Now we have a
>much better alternative and I for one applaud IBM for giving us this
option.

This raises another good point.  Although such source retrieval
services have been available for RPG III programs for some time, the
problem is be much more difficult for RPG IV programs.  In particular,
the code generated for expressions is much more complicated than
anything generated by the RPG III compiler.  So, the need for proper
backup procedures is even more important for RPG IV.

>
>Now remember boys and girls Compile all your ILE programs with
DBGVIEW(*ALL)
>or at the very least DBGVIEW(*LIST) someday you will thank me :-)

I think that's a dangerous recommendation that may lead to
complacency.  In my opinion, there is no substitute for proper
backup/recovery procedures along with proper change management
procedures.

Using the dbgview(*list) information is a cute trick, but it's
too prone to misuse to be considered a reliable technique for
source recovery.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com


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