Manually inspecting your RTC generated package for z/OS

I guess any user of Rational Team Concert Enterprise Extensions is familiar with the packaging feature (see Packaging and deploying with Enterprise Extensions otherwise). This packaging feature, based on the location specified in its definition, stores the  package it generates for a later deployment. The package can additionally be added to the packaging result Downloads tab with the following flag:

While the package result provides a great insight of what has been packaged in the “Package Summary” tab and the “Package Summary Work Item” that creates; what if I want to manually inspect the contents of the package?

This post started as a result of some testing I was doing; when I decided to download the “package.zip” file to my workstation and tried to unzip it. No luck. Strange it was the unexpected result and the error I tried the same operation in OMVS directly, locating the package from the location specified in the package result:

However, I got the same error trying to unzip on the host:

Therefore I broadened the conversation to the team. After a very enlightening discussion with a team mate, I was able to expand the package archive. The main details can be summarized in:

• We use pax to create the package archive.
• The archive pax generates is compatible with tar. Therefore “tar” command can be used to open/inspect the package
• Some utilities like 7zip will will recognize automatically the package.zip format and open it. But seems like unzip OS commands (from Linux or OMVS) won’t and will then fail.

So getting back to the original situation. I could use tar to extract the package archive contents. From the mainframe, a simple command did the trick:

You can follow a similar approach if you want download the zip file to your workstation.

Hope this helps anybody else out there willing to manually check the package contents. You can review these details and additional information in the jazz.net workitem 360393: Package zip – rename it to tar.