Okay, everyone is beating me up for not reporting this problem. Let me tell you the story that put me off to PMRs.
In January of 2012 or so I sent a note to IBMMAIN saying that that CEE3DMP was printing garbage and then S0C4ing. You can probably find my post if you search. At the urging of this group I opened a PMR on February 3. Here was the first battle I had to fight. The program in question is a STC that installs exits and so I implemented Signal handling so that in the event of a problem it could shut down gracefully. To test that code I added an undocumented MODIFY command to force a S0C4. I encountered the problem while testing that intentional S0C4/signal handling code. That was how I could reproduce the problem. I went around and around with the level 1 folks saying "we found your problem -- you are trying to store into low core" and me saying "I am doing that on purpose to force this problem. Look at the PMR description. I know what causes the original S0C4 -- it's the garbage and the S0C4 in CEE3DMP that I am PMRing" and they would come back and say "your problem is you are trying to store into low core." After I got past that IBM wanted dump after dump after dump from me. They did not reproduce the problem -- it was all "change this option, try it again, and send us the dump." I sent them a total of nine different tersed dumps and similar files over the course of three months. Not a trivial thing with an STC that is intertwined with the z/OS kernel. Finally they said "okay, we have this figured out, we're going to work on it" and then in OCTOBER they sent me a local fix to test. I tested it and confirmed that they had fixed it. Then IBM came back to me and said "do you really, really, REALLY need this fixed?" and I said "no, of course not, I've been living for eight months with it not fixed." They said "good, because if we really issue a PTF for this, we need to do regression testing and everything which is a lot of work. How about if we just roll the fix into the next release of LE (z/OS 2.0!)." At that point I said "sure, whatever." Whereupon IBM said "by the way, there's no guarantee your local fix won't go away if we happen to issue some other PTF that impacts it." Needless to say I am not very encouraged to open PMRs based on that experience. I think those of you who say "don't you care about the customers?" have it totally backwards. Of course I care about the customers. If someone posted here "that CorreLog SIEM agent is okay but it seems to S0C4 from time to time" I would be all over it. I would track the OP down, find out what he was doing, duplicate the problem, and fix it. I would not wait until the customer jumped through some particular process hoop before I acknowledged the problem, or prove how much the S0C4 was hurting their production. I care about MY customers, and I care about IBM's customers, but you can't push a piece of string: I can't care about IBM's customers more than IBM does. What IBM SHOULD be doing IMHO -- and I was shocked that for the first time in my experience they did it in the case of the error of this thread -- is have someone, an ombudsman, monitoring this list and with authority to open problems and get them fixed. I am very, very pleased to see that that is what is happening in this one particular case. Note that I was very forthcoming with information here even after my particular problem went away. I am not selfish. I posted the listings that enabled some very clever people to find the problem for IBM. I am very willing to contribute effort to solving problems on behalf of the community. I have just come to the conclusion that the PMR process is simply not sufficiently cost/benefit effective to work for me. Thanks for listening. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Saturday, July 27, 2013 10:06 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Looking for help with an obscure C integer problem On Sat, 27 Jul 2013 14:59:15 -0500, Ed Gould wrote: > >This is in my opinion a fuzzy error. Where the C issue is a classic >bug(probably) your SR Policy is a gray area and it is harder to define >a right/wrong answer (although probably you are right). >Spelling & such is a issue but not a real bug. It is a soft issue, in >my opinion and a lot harder to get IBM interested. > I certainly did not say that my "SR Policy" thread was motivated by the response to a report of a spelling error. In fact, it was a report of the misbehavior I discussed in the "Buffering: stdout ..." thread. I suppose you're free to deem it cosmetic or not as you choose. The good news is that IBM has reproduced the problem, even while prodding me for a statement of business impact (which I supplied, acknowledging that I was working on a PoC). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
