On May 22, 2024, at 12:59 PM, Michael Mayer <michael.mayer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Debating whether to add his link to the blog. Anyone care to weigh in?
On Wed, May 22, 2024 at 1:15 PM Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There are a number of shops where SQL is verboten. Stupid - but true. Why would you not want such folks to be able to find alternatives?
Not only that, but what about people who are just looking for
ready-made, ready-to-use utilities? Of the people who download the
software, I'm guessing somewhere between 80% and 95% are not going to
read a single line of the source code.
In fact, Ake says that some of the functionality provided is actually
built upon SQL services provided by IBM.
The statement "There are certainly ways to do what he has listed on
his site via SQL services" seems an odd reason to even consider
leaving off an IBM i resource. If that is even entering your thought
process, then you should be reviewing all the other free and open
source software linked to on your site, because I am confident that a
lot of it can now either be accomplished wholly or in part via IBM i
services. Maybe you want to remove them?
And those IBM i services... there is no real user interface to them. A
lot of the value provided by people's open source contributions is the
user-friendly wrapping. Should we all have to build our own utilities
because IBM has provided the necessary building blocks? Should we
rewrite our existing utilities because some part of their
implementation can now be done with SQL?
Finally, in my own experience, "provided with the operating system" is
not even a guarantee of reliability or correctness. Particularly in
SYSTOOLS. That's a demo library, not a system tools library. We were
playing around with GENERATE_SPREADSHEET and SEND_EMAIL and both leave
a lot to be desired.
GENERATE_SPREADSHEET needs to know the system's IP address, but it can
fail (I think due to improper or incomplete DNS setup, or something
like that). Turns out we can patch it and do better ourselves (by
using another IBM i service to grab the IP address!).
SEND_EMAIL does something that I consider unconscionable: It tries to
start the SMTP service if not already running. Hello?! Maybe there is
a good reason that service isn't running! Instead of just starting it,
it should provide an error message explaining the situation and then
exit. (How did I find this out? A colleague of mine was simply trying
to kick the tires on this function, and wound up releasing a whole
bunch of email from our dev box, causing a LOT of concern and
commotion at our company.)
Sorry, I know I kind of went sideways there, but my point is: Keeping
something that could be useful off of a site meant to be a
comprehensive collection of IBM i resources seems misguided and
presumptuous to me. I don't know what standard Ake's contributions
could be falling short of, that isn't ALSO unmet by (a) existing
software linked on the site, and (b) IBM's own software!
John Y.
midrange.com
