Please no: [OS X TeX] set environment variablesforapplications

[Kino]

On May 26, 2004, at 20:13, Gerben Wierda wrote:

>> On May 26, 2004, at 05:29, Gerben Wierda wrote:
>>
>>>> Even if it were possible to set it per application, I would prefer 
>>>> setting $PATH for them generally. Otherwise, it would be difficult 
>>>> to keep the consistency.
>>>
>>> Yes. But suppose you add /sw/bin to the start of your PATH and as a
>>> result a different version of a command is used and your application
>>> which uses a subprocess that now suddenly fails. And how do you know
>>> why?
>>
>> I know. Why not? It's me who configured my environment.plist. And it 
>> is just because I want to avoid such an unexpected result that I have 
>> set $PATH in an appropriate order and done testings.
>
> If you set /sw/bin at the start of your PATH in environment.plist, and 
> fink has installed its own version of grep, awk, sed, mv, etc., these 
> might also be used for example by Apple's Installer.app in its pre- 
> and postflight scripts. So any .pkg you install that has such scripts 
> potentially runs different (versions of) commands than what Apple (or 
> anybody writing a package) expects. This can lead to malfunction (not 
> all greps behave the same) and in the worst case security breaches.
>

On this point, I agree with you. This is one of the reasons why I never 
run Installer.app from my ordinary account. Also because I have many 
plug-ins installed in my home directory, which may affect, I'm afraid.


Kino

-----------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>
Please see <http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/> for list
guidelines, information, and LaTeX/TeX resources.