by steve-myers » Fri 05 Jul 2013, 16:02
In the mainframe world, "roll your own," or sometimes RYO, refers to writing your own version of something.
in the 1980s, I spent several unhappy years supporting a RYO security system that was loosely based, as far as I could tell, on nothing, and a tape management system very loosely based on an early UCC-1 (now CA-1) system.
In some respects the tape management system was better; its catalog was a VSAM data set and used VSAM Global Shared Resources for most of its accesses. On the other hand there was no provision for multiple systems sharing the catalog. Late in my career at this site it was replaced with CA-1.
The security system was a disaster. I think it predated both the RACF and ACF2 systems. Its data set security model prevented the use of indexed VTOCs and System Managed Storage. Its password implementation was so bad I won't bother to tell you how bad it was. There was no provision for multiple systems.
The primary reason RYO replacements for language processor cataloged procedures are a bad idea is the replacement procedures do not reflect product updates, and often cause problems for this reason.
For what it's worth I, personally, am a serious offender here. Almost all my work here is in Assembler. I rarely use batch for compilations; almost all my compilations are done in my TSO session. My assemblies are done using a CLIST in a personal library. When I do assemblies in batch I don't bother with the "standard" catalog procedures, and I don't RYO procedures; I usually use just JCL.
You are a known quantity here; like me you are qualified enough to self support, which most of our users are not. I doubt the admins are going to bother with you.