[OS X TeX] X11

Ettore Aldrovandi ealdrov at zeno.math.fsu.edu
Fri May 27 23:22:43 CEST 2005


On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 10:57:40PM +0200, Gerben Wierda wrote:
> On 27 May 2005, at 17:39, Rodrigo Banuelos wrote:

> >I know this to do with bash vs tcsh but, what is the permanent
> >solution?
 
> It does not have to do with bash vs tcsh. The problem is that
> xterm does not create login shells, but subshells only and as a
> result parts of the initialization (e.g. /etc/csh.login) are
> not read at all. Since the TeX i-Package has modified the shell
> login scripts, you do not get the right PATH.
 
> There is (or at least I do not know) no generic file I could
> patch for X11 that would change this for *all* users. And the
> TeX install I provide is multi-user.

/etc/csh.cshrc

is read by non login shells.

/etc/bashrc

is read by interactive shells, I'm not sure if non-login--but I
don't use bash, so I can't say precisely. (In scripts I invoke it
as /bin/sh anyway.)

So one could set the path there, although that's probably an
inelegant solution.

A more elegant solution could be to set the path in the
.MacOSX/environment.plist file. In that way the correct
environment would be inherited by X11.app and its children (via
xinit).

> Maybe some X11 guru can finally tell me how to do this
> system-wide.  Maybe there is some personal .xinit file where
> you can change environment settings. I do not use X11, so I do
> not have the knowledge.

Well, I'm not a guru. Anyway, X executes the user's .xinitrc or,
missing that, /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. In the default
configuration the latter starts an xterm and execs quartz-wm. It
is a /bin/sh script, hence it's perfectly conceivable to set the
path there, like:

PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/<path-to-gwTeX>"
export PATH


I used to have this in my own .xinitrc, to add Darwinports plus
other stuff, but later on I erased it in favor of a stock
system-wide xinitrc plus .MacOSX/environment.plist.


Hope this helps

-- 
Ettore Aldrovandi
Department of Mathematics	http://www.math.fsu.edu/~ealdrov
Florida State University	      aldrovandi at math.fsu.edu
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4510, USA	   +1 (850) 644-9717 (FAX: 4053)
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