[OS X TeX] i-Installer & Jaguar (10.2) Trivial Fix

[Troy Goodson]

On Friday, October 4, 2002, at 12:25  PM, Aaron D. Lewis wrote:

> In my case, I had renamed a folder from 'i-Installer' to 'i-Installer
> (tetex/gs)', I believe in Troy's case, the problem is with his
> 'installer:updaters' folder.
>
> In either case, apparently one of the sub-programs in the install  
> script
> can't parse the path properly (I bet it didn't like my "/"), and they
> fail...
>

Aaron,

I bet you're right about the bug, I should go back and try to verify,  
myself.

As a side note, in OS X, if you name a folder "i-Installer (tetex/gs)"  
using Finder, Unix applications will instead see "i-Installer  
(textex:gs)".  It does this because ":" is the traditional Macintosh  
path delimiter while "/" is the traditional Unix path delimiter.  See  
also  
<http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix2000/ 
invitedtalks/sanchez_html/>, Wilfredo Sanchez's paper to USENIX 2000,  
which I've quoted below:

> Another obvious problem is the different path separators between HFS+  
> (colon, ':') and UFS (slash, '/'). This also means that HFS+ file  
> names may contain the slash character and not colons, while the  
> opposite is true for UFS file names. This was easy to address, though  
> it involves transforming strings back and forth. The HFS+  
> implementation in the kernel's VFS layer converts colon to slash and  
> vice versa when reading from and writing to the on-disk format. So on  
> disk, the separator is a colon, but at the VFS layer (and therefore  
> anything above it and the kernel, such as libc) it's a slash. However,  
> the traditional Mac OS toolkits expect colons, so above the BSD layer,  
> the core Carbon toolkit does yet another translation. The result is  
> that Carbon applications see colons, and everyone else sees slashes.  
> This can create a user-visible schizophrenia in the rare cases of file  
> names containing colon characters, which appear to Carbon applications  
> as slash characters, but to BSD programs and Cocoa applications as  
> colons.

Not to start a flame war, but I've always been a little frustrated by  
this decision (the part about Cocoa apps seeing colons) because it  
means that filenames you see via Finder (which is Carbon) will be  
different than filenames you see in Cocoa applications :(

Troy.


-----------------------------------------------------
Mac TeX info, resources, and news can be found at:
<http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/>
-----------------------------------------------------
List archives can be found at:
<http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/MacOSX-TeX-Digests/>
Threaded list archives can be found at:
<http://www.masda.vxu.se/~pku/MacOSX_TeX/>
-----------------------------------------------------
See message headers for list info.
-----------------------------------------------------