Re: Service programs and QSRVSRC

["M. Lazarus" <mlazarus@xxxxxxxx>]

Buck,

 But what's the upside to manually managed sigs?  Does it buy you 
much?  If all you are looking for is an additional area to put 
version info, there are other places to do that without disabling 
what little protection it does afford.

 Either way, I think you need to know what you're doing when 
building *SRVPGMs.

 -mark


At 10/13/09 11:13 AM, you wrote:
> M. Lazarus wrote:
>
> >  What I'm saying is that unless there is a really good reason to roll
> > your own *and* a solid way to ensure that the signature gets changed
> > when the exports change, let the system generate the unique value for you.
>
> I understand what you're saying here, and what you're saying has merit.
>  On the other hand, in what, 10 years? I haven't come across much in the
> way of protection with the system generated signatures.  Here's why.
>
> The overwhelming majority of my changes to a service program, far and
> away, consist of adding a new exported procedure.  Sure, I could use
> EXPORT(*ALL) and let the system generate a new signature for me, but
> that would require me to recompile every client program, despite
> absolute 100% certainty that none of them have been affected by this
> change.
>
> I can think of only one case when the system generated signature would
> have helped me, and that's when I accidentally deleted an export.  In
> the event, the client program rolled over and died because there was a
> gross parameter mismatch.
>
> I suppose that there's a window of horrible opportunity for a deleted
> export to slip through (no signature violation because of my signature
> naming) and the client program consumes the wrong procedure because the
> parameters are 'close enough.'  In that case, a signature violation
> would alert me to the problem before the code executes.
>
> I think the general objection is that the chance of encountering this
> sort of snafu is much lower than the certainty of having to recompile
> all my client programs when I know full well they don't need it.
>   --buck