Forced installation of COBOL Language Support by COBOL Control Flow about cobol-control-flow

[FALLAI-Denis]

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.

[zimlu02]

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]

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