----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Klein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 2:15 PM
Subject: "Message Standards" w9as: Another OS/390 to z/OS 1.4 migration
question (COBOL)
Tom,
You say this in this message and said (when I asked where you got this
idea -
in another message)
"I got this idea from the IBM pubs coordinator. "
Can you tell me "Who/what" "IBM pubs coordinator" told you that there
was an
IBM-wide "standard" that all messages (for all products) should have a
documented "programmer response" documentation?
This is a quite serious question. I (personally) am aware of "product
publication coordinators" but from all the times that I have dealt with
IBM dox,
I new of some inter-product communication BUT not of any IBM-wide
coordinator.
If there is truly such a person (or position) *AND* if they truly have a
company-wide policy, then is very much something that "we" need to deal
with the
COBOL folks on.
Bill,
In the mid-90's, I was pushing to get ISPF's "self-documenting" messages
documented in a manual. My escalations took me to a woman (don't remember
her name), who either worked in Mechanicsburg, or had responsibility for
Mechanicsburg (for those who do not remember, Mechanicsburg used to be IBM's
paper mill, er, manual center). She informed me that it was an IBM
Corporate Standard that all messages be documented in a manual, with
appropriate response fields. Armed with that knowledge, we tilted at the
ISPF windmill, and won. My attempts to get the IS HELL messages have been
far less successful; the developer has made it clear to me that he thinks
I'm an idiot if I can't figure out his "self-documenting" messages (search
the archives of IBM-Main a few years ago if you want to see my rants on that
subject, I think BPXM003 was the specific message id). The next windmill
that has presented itself is this COBOL stuff. Now that Kevin Kelley is on
the case, I'm feeling a lot better about getting this done. I plan to bring
this up at SHARE as something that IBM must address at a corporate level.
They talk about the need to make z/OS an easier platform to administer,
deploy, and use, but they have developers who won't even document the error
messages put out by their products. That's got to stop.
Regards,
Tom Conley
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