SYS:SITE; A novice adminstrator's question

[Chucko@CHARON.arc.nasa.gov (Charles R. Fry)]

    Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1991 07:45 PDT
    From: delaney@xn.ll.mit.edu (John R. Delaney)

    It appears from the instructions for system installation that the file
    "SYS:SITE;SYS.TRANSLATIONS" should translate "SYS: **; *.*.*" into 
    "<some host>:>REL-<majo number>-<minor-number>>SYS>**>*.*.*" using
    SET-LOGICAL-PATHNAME-HOST. Fine. 

    It appears from the namespace description that the site object site
    directory attribute should give the translation for "SYS: SITE;", e.g.,
    "<some host>:>SITE>". It would also appear that this translation take
    precedence over the above. That is, if I copied a file to "SYS: SITE;
    FOO.SYSTEM" some time long after booting, it would end up in "<some
    host>:>SITE>FOO.SYSTEM".

    Is that correct? Is that what one really wants? I can conceive of cases
    where I want a different .SYSTEM file for different Genera releases. 

This is correct; the translation for SYS:SITE;*.*.* comes from the
namespace and there is no way to override it (believe me, I've tried!).
In general that is what you really want, because *.SYSTEM files should
refer to logical pathnames for the system definition files, and the
translations for those logical paths can vary between releases.

If you really DO want the system definition file to vary between
releases, it is pretty simple to dispatch on release major and minor
versions.

 -- Chuck Fry  Chucko@charon.arc.nasa.gov