Please no: [OS X TeX] set environment variables for applications

[Kino]

On May 24, 2004, at 22:15, Gerben Wierda wrote:

>> it's possible to set environment variables for all processes launched 
>> by a specific user (including those launched via Finder), as 
>> described in
>> http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html
>
> Please, can somebody else than me kill this suggestion ASAP? If you 
> start to set variables for all applications there, the variables also 
> go to apps like i-Installer and not all scripts inside i-Packages are 
> robust for an unlimited amount of environment variable settings.

But this is a well known method since longtime. IIRC I created my 
environment.plist when I compiled perl 5.6.1 on OS X 10.1.x following 
the instructions available as
<http://duke.usask.ca/~dalglb/macosx/Perl_5.6.html>

However I may misunderstand what you say as I'm not a user of 
i-Packages. But...

>> To sum it up, create a file named ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist (if it 
>> does not yet exist) that looks like
>
> Applications shoul dmanage their own environment. Changing it for all 
> applications because an application does not support its own set of 
> preferences is a remedy which may be more dangerous than the cause.

What do you mean by *applications*? If that's Aqua apps, you would 
confuse user defaults -- mostly set from Preferences GUI -- with 
variables defined by environment.plist. I use it, for example, to set 
$PATH for shell commands executed via TextExtras or from within Aqua 
applications such as TeXShop and Xcode. If I'm not mistaken, this works 
also with BBEdit that I don't have.

To set user defaults globally, you can use 'defaults -g ...' or edit 
'~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist' manually btw.


Kino


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