I really have to question whether reading or writing a file is that much easier than dealing with a dataset. In fact, one of the selling points used to be that DD names made your program device independent. A sequential file could be stand-alone or a member of a PDS. It could be on cards, tape, disk, drum, cell, display terminal/keyboard, and now file system.
Why would compressing a file be that much different than compressing a dataset? -----Original Message----- From: Paul Gilmartin [mailto:snip] Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 9:26 AM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Shop zSeries Ordering Issues On Fri, 2 May 2008 15:13:43 -0700, Schwarz, Barry A wrote: >And while we are on the subject, why does an internet download have to >go to a Unix file? Is there some reason SMP/E couldn't handle a normal >dataset? If I wanted a Unix system, I would have bought one. > Because UNIX is simpler, easier to use, and allowed implementation of the function with only base z/OS software. I was not privy to the design considerations, but I imagine the designers wanted an archive scheme that was available with base z/OS; and could be used with a non-z/OS-peculiar server. Compression is also desirable. What are the options?: o TSO TRANSMIT? Widely used, but requires TSO TMP. I suppose a requirement to run SMP/E under TSO or vice-versa was unattractive. And the format is not compressed, but quite the opposite with a high overhead. o AMATERSE? Not in base z/OS at the time the facility was developed. o ADRDSSU? Don't know. Is it Internet-friendly? And I lately discovered that there's a rule that to unpack an ADRDSSU archive the user must have read access in the profile governing the original data set name, even when unpacking to a different name; a clear impediment to portability. I understand the rationale for this rule, but it could have been relaxed somewhat and still achieved its objective. I suppose the first scheme they found that met the criteria was the pax.Z format common in UNIX. But why didn't they abandon relative files and put everything inline with GIMDTS, compressed with GIMCPTS? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
