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

[Gerben Wierda]

On Friday, Oct 4, 2002, at 21:25 Europe/Amsterdam, Aaron D. Lewis wrote:

> Hope no one has already posted this - I don't read the list constantly:

[snip]

> Here's the solution - don't rename any of the folders in the path to
> i-Installer with unhappy characters.
>
> 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.

This is probably very correct.

> 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...

You have made a very important point.

Apple has done its best to combine the behaviour of the two existing 
directory separator characters (/ for UFS and more generally: Cocoa 
style and ':' for HFS and more generally Carbon style). This happens at 
various levels in Mac OS X (i.e. Mac OS X translates : to / when it 
accesses HFS+ systems).

Examples:
	Create a directory bla/bla through the Finder. Now make a directry 
listing at the unix level with ls, it is displayed as bla:bla

At the unix level (where the scripts run), the directory separator 
character is '/', even on HFS+ file systems. ':' is used often at the 
unix level to denote a 'system' separator, as in host:/path/to/file. 
Thus the error:

rcmd: getaddrinfo: No address associated with nodename

where nodename is another unix term for remote hostname.

Though some applications (Finder) may happily enable you to use '/' as 
part of file names and directory names (which turn into ':' at the unix 
level), the practice breaks not only i-Installer but many if not most 
unix level tools.

G


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