Forced installation of COBOL Language Support by COBOL Control Flow

BroadcomMFD / cobol-control-flow

COBOL Control Flow is an extension for Visual Studio Code that provides graphical visualization of program flow for programs written in COBOL.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=broadcomMFD.ccf

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Forced installation of COBOL Language Support by COBOL Control Flow #57

Open FALLAI-Denis opened 10 months ago

FALLAI-Denis commented 10 months ago

Hi,

It seems that since the version 1.0.6 of COBOL Control Flow, the installation of COBOL Language Support is mandatory and automatically triggered...

This does not meet our expectations because while we like COBOL Control Flow, we do not use COBOL Language Support, and do not intend to use it...

COBOL Language Support conflicts with the extension that we have chosen to use to manage our COBOL sources, in particular on the search for COPYBOOKs, but surely on other points as well.

It also triggers false problems on certain COBOL syntaxes.

However, it is indicated at the COBOL Control Flow level that the use of COBOL Language Support is recommended, but not required.

COBOL Language Support cannot be uninstalled or disabled without also uninstalling or disabling COBOL Control FLow.

Is this a definitive situation, or is it possible to return to the previous situation where COBOL Language Support is not mandatory?

zimlu02 commented 10 months ago

Hi Denis,

thank you for your feedback and the missing documentation updates reminder (it will be fixed in the next patch release).

To provide the most accurate graph, CCF requires advanced syntax analysis that can only be provided by COBOL LS. It cannot be integrated with any other tool. To empower you to still use CCF, we suggest the following steps:

we will, with a priority, fix the issues that you have reported
assist you in setting up copybooks support (again - to render the correct graph we need information from copybooks and this cannot be retrieved from other tools than COBOL LS)
if needed, we can add the option to turn off any COBOL LS error reporting. In this mode, it would become invisible to you and it will only feed CCF

zimlu02 commented 10 months ago

In the meantime, if you prefer, you can still downgrade to the previous version 1.0.5 https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_30#_install-previous-versions

FALLAI-Denis commented 10 months ago

Hi @zimlu02,

I understand that there will be no going back on the dependency between CCF and COBOL LS... This is bad news for us because to date we are not considering switching to COBOL LS to replace our current solution based on another extension.

As far as we are concerned, COBOL LS is essentially missing the dynamic management of conditional compilation, which appeared with IBM Enterprise COBOL V6, and which is standardized COBOL ISO. We took advantage of this functionality to create a framework based on copybooks which condition the call to other copybooks by a set of conditional compilation variables. A first test carried out with COBOL LS demonstrates that there is no management of conditional compilation during analysis, and that all copybooks are systematically searched and included, even if discarded by conditional compilation, which then creates numerous errors in the analysis of the source code.