Re: RE: binding directories

Without in any way disagreeing with or criticizing this approach (it
sounds as if you have thought things through pretty well, and I've been
very interested in reading your comments), in our shop we have another
solution to maintenance problem of changing modules. We use Hawkeye's
Pathfinder product, which offers a "mass compile" option. You can tell it
which module has changed and it will (optionally) compile the module and
then update all the programs that use it. It works for data files, too,
and it seems to be fairly fast and fool-proof -- I've used it about half a
dozen times over the past few months (don't ask! ;-), and I haven't had
any problems yet.

It may be expensive (my boss keeps saying, "we paid a lot of money for
that -- let's use it all we can"!), but it has a lot of handy things you
can do that save time in the development process.

I'm not saying it's better -- just another option.

rpg400-l@midrange.com writes:
>You can change the service
>program and all programs that use it will automatically get the new
>version
>without having to be touched at all.   Because of how this works it is my
>opinion that binding modules is a bad thing (remember my opinion) because
>of
>the maintenance nightmare it can cause.  Make a change to a module and
>forget to rebind a program that uses it.


Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA  01376
413-863-4357 x444
mnaughton@juddwire.com