Re: Officially the weirdest thing I've seen in RDi

On Fri, 17 Aug 2018 at 07:49, Ken Killian <kkillian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sadly, I have used iProjects. And it has burned me....

Ken, your note is like a time machine of my life. I can very much
imagine myself writing this exact thing 20 years ago - I might even
have done, for all I know. My current self is different to that
earlier self, and I'd like to take the opportunity to write a note,
put it in the TARDIS, and deliver it to my past self so I could... get
past this block. Here is my message in a Klein Bottle:

Younger Buck,
It happened again. You've use iProjects to group all the source
members for a particular mod in one place, pushed it to production,
and the debugger insists on referring to the old source in the
iProject. That frustrates the heck out of you and you've sworn off
iProjects as the crappiest crap ever put into IBM software.

Don't be so hasty. There's nothing wrong with iProjects - the problem
is you. Wait, don't stop reading yet. This is your older, wiser self
here - you best take my advice. I'm going to need you to be smarter
Real Soon Now. But I can't talk about that - spoilers! Yes, I still
ramble. I'm working on it. It turns out that you're going to need
iProjects for... argh. Yes, spoilers.

The problem with iProjects isn't the tool - it's how you're using it.
You are right-handed. You can cut with left-handed scissors, but it
won't turn out well. You'll have deja vu when you learn that lesson
yourself. iProjects is designed to be a semi-permanent container for
your source. It was a good idea to use iProjects to keep track of all
the things for the ZIP code expansion project! It was a bad idea to
assume that the iProject disappeared when you uploaded the source back
to production. Let me say that again, with different words, because
we're still stubborn 20 years later - You can't have the iProject AND
the production code in the IDE at the same time. Once more, with
feeling: If the iProject is done, the source uploaded, iProject not
needed any more, DELETE THE iPROJECT.

Rule Zero: As long as the iProject is in the IDE, the iProject IS THE
CANONICAL, OFFICIAL SOURCE OF RECORD. Edit iProjects, or edit
production. NEVER, EVER, CROSS THE STREAMS!
Yes, I'm yelling. We haven't got over that either. Working on that, too.

If there's some reason you need to keep the iProject around (like
having to deploy it on multiple LPARs / customer machines) then under
no circumstances should you ever change the code on the IBM side -
change it in iProjects and push it again. Yes, that seems like a
pain, but it's up to you to honour Rule Zero at all times - RDi won't
magically know that you've done a push and it can now safely ignore
the iProject forever more.

Well Younger Buck, the TARDIS will only allow a finite number of
electrons to go back into our past timeline, but I hope you get the
idea.

Never violate Rule Zero. The space-time continuum depends on that.
--Older Buck