[pca] specifying alternate name for patchdiag.xref file?

[Martin Paul]

Hello,

> I keep local copies of the patchdiag.xref file.  I'd like to append
> the date or some other unique string to each such patchdiag.xref
> filename. Then, when I am installing a new machine, I would like to
> pull/specify a specific patchdiag.xref file to be used for that
> machine (tagged/QA'ed for my "release").

Making the name of the patchdiag.xref file configurable is actually not 
as easy as it might seem. One of the problems would be in combination 
with the local caching proxy, where the name of the requested file is 
used by pca to determine what type of file the client is asked for. With 
random names possible for patchdiag.xref, this detection would be more 
problematic, or at least require some strict guidelines for naming the file.

But it's no problem to achieve what you want with the options that are 
already there. Instead of naming the xref file e.g. "patchdiag.xref-rel" 
or "patchdiag.xref-20100301", just create directories with different 
names and put the patchdiag.xref into those.

You can then use either "xrefdir=/path/to/xref-rel" or 
"xrefurl=http://server/xref-20100301/" to point pca at the xref file you 
want to use.

Does that work for you?

> I know how to specify the path to my local copy of patchdiag.xref
> using the --xrefurl option ..

Just a side-note: If you have a local copy, to be used read-only, you 
can use "--xrefdir=/dir/with/xref/ --nocheckxref" instead of the 
"xrefurl" option. With xrefurl being set, pca will get a copy of the 
file from the URL and store it in "xrefdir" (/var/tmp by default). So 
using e.g. a "file:/path/" URL can usually be replaced with the above 
combination of "xrefdir" and "nocheckxref".

Martin.