RE: separate DEV, TEST, & PROD environments survey

Not sure who this is for - Im the OP so maybe its to me.

Yes I would consider one level libs a design weakness and limitation. Not so much for the late 1960's when the System/3 was being hatched but yes in 2013 when companies are always looking at alternatives.

As I stated, all other non-defunct OS's have provided multi-level structures in their MAJOR object organization (not a side-show like IFS). They all provide multiple path levels for objects.

If you were to tell a developer or system administrator from any other platform that they could have only one level of paths, they would laugh and not take it seriously. For example, tell a windows or unix pgmr that they can only have MyDocuments or MyPrograms, but no folders below that.

Lib list doesn't allow organization of objects like multi-level paths. One would have to start re-naming vendor supplied libs to get it to work with PROD/TEST/DEV environments.

For example if an accounting package supplied libs MyAcctPgms and MyAcctData and MyAcctScrns, then these would all have to be renamed for dev, test & prod. What a mess. Or separate Lpars or separate machines. Big big dollars.

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.

But most don't agree with me so I may be wrong that it is a problem.

Although I think it is important to realize both the pros and the cons of things so we can deal with these limitations.



-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Eric Lehti
Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2013 10:31 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: separate DEV, TEST, & PROD environments survey

Do you consider it a design weakness/limitation that all other libraries are one level deep under QSYS? QSYS is the only library that can contain other libraries. This is by IBM's design.

If you want to mimic the structure of other libraries nested within libraries, e.g. QTEMP, SECURITY, PRODATA, PRODCOMMON, CUSTOMOBJ, PRISTINEOBJ, QGPL, just use library lists. The library list provides that capability, up to 250 libraries in a list.
Specify one list of libraries for production, another list of libraries for Test, another list of libraries for Development.

Many single-LPAR machines provide Production, Test, and Development environments by using different library lists.

If IBM's design of QSYS and its child libraries is a limitation, what examples of application software providers can you point to that have said, "we gotta have libraries nested within libraries and therefore we choose [name-the-operating-system-and-database]