On Thu, 27 Apr 89 12:40:42 EDT Herbert A. Huston said:
>Yesterday I attended the spring meeting of the Washington, DC, VM Users'
>Group where Tom Klensk of IBM spoke on, among other features, the list
>processor line driver (LISTPROC) for Version 2 of RSCS. He admitted that
>at present there were no IBM applications for VM that make use of this
>feature. (I refrained from asking the obvious question because of the
>standard answer; for readers on non-IBM systems, the standard answer is
>"I cannot comment on unannounced products.")
The LISTPROC feature has long been a part of IBM's internal
network, VNET. It was released as part of a set of VNET features, at
the urging of the SHARE VM Group. It is widely used by other parts of
VNET, like the TOOLS conference/fileserver network. Mike "Call me
REXX" Cowlishaw has spoken about TOOLS at SHARE on at least one
occasion, but there doesn't seem to be any movement afoot to pry it
out of IBM.
> However, LISTPROC would seem
>to be a natural for LISTSERV, RiceMAIL, and MAILER to make use of, and I
>was wondering if there are any plans to do so.
1) a) Yes.
b) Maybe.
c) Yes.
2) No.
> Just as a footnote, Version 1
>of RSCS was withdrawn from marketing on Monday and is to be withdrawn from
>programming support on February 28, 1990; it would seem reasonable to expect
>a higher growth both in absolute number and percentage of VM sites running
>Version 2 over the next several months (we're in the process of mi-
>grating right now).
A mass migration from V1 to V2 might just poke the right people
(Eric Thomas, Jown Wagner, and myself) into doing something to support
LISTPROC from LISTSERV and MAILER. RiceMail doesn't really need it,
unless you run it without MAILER (and noone does that, right? ;{) ).
The main reason for the current lack of interest is that all the good
work of the LISTPROC facility falls apart at the first
non-(RSCSv2|JES2) site along the transmission path. To my knowlege,
only RSCSv2 and JES2 support multiple Network Dataset Headers (NDH)
per dataset. This basic NJE facility is the underlying vehicle used
by the LISTPROC code. All other implementations I know of (VS1, VSE
Power, JES3, HASP, UREP, JNET (maybe not, Joiner's a pretty slick
operation)) "fan-out" the job when they receive it. This means that
you'll pass one file with 50 addresses down the line from RSCSv2 to
JES2 to RSCSv1, and RSCSv1 will generate 50 files, each with one
address. If you think LISTSERV can fill spool fast, watch this
process run.
Ross Patterson
Rutgers University
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