IBM i Defaults are just defaults – not the optimal settings

This weekend I upgraded an old Turnover 5.4 Change Management installation to the newer V100 version across several LPAR’s of a customer’s IBMi installation.

As part of the mission to tidy up the Software Change process – I see a lot of objects that are routinely created with various parameters being over-ridden because the defaults don’t fit my customer’s software development model. Now, the problem with this is that a standard is set and then followed, sometimes blindly, for years. Obviously, any step in a compilation where the programmer has to remember to over-ride the default creation parameters is time-consuming and error-prone.

So, wonder why IBM havent changed the defaults for these commands since the good old AS/400 days:

Could we use CHGCMDDFT to set the following parameters as new defaults:

CRTSRCPF RCDLEN(132)

Increase from old RPG3 standard 92 rcdlen, thru RPGLE standard of 112 to new RPG4/Free standard of 132

CRTPF SIZE(1000000 10000 10) REUSEDLT(*YES)

This size is routinely overridden to *NOMAX (not a good idea) so setting a more realistic default size might be appropriate? 1m records?

Set Source view in *DEBUG mode to *SOURCE allows developers to debug code and see the code it was compiled with:

CRTRPGMOD DBGVIEW(*SOURCE)

CRTCLMOD DBGVIEW(*SOURCE)

CRTBNDRPG DBGVIEW(*SOURCE)

CRTBNDCL DBGVIEW(*SOURCE)

Note: I also notice around 60% of code overrides in turnover use OPTION(*NOEVENTF) – this is basically excluding an Event File that is created for editing source code using the old Websphere Code GUI (CODE400). I believe this is the default anyway so I don’t know why some folks are overriding it. Maybe just habit?

For smoother screen transitions:

CRTDSPF RSTDSP(*YES)

I would vote for these command defaults to be set across all machines – with the possible exception of PROD systems not requiring the DBGVIEW(*SOURCE) parm?

Setting a file to an initial seize of ten thousand records before it hits a wall and tells the operator that the file is FULL is laughable nowadays… I think I have files on my phone with more records than that

😉