[OS X TeX] iInstaller and manually installed components

[Martin Costabel]

Peter Dyballa wrote:
[]
> There are strange reasons why the Fink folks think their ls, grep, file, 
> libtool, gettext, libXaw3d ... are better than the Apple supplied GNU 
> utilities. 

I know that anti-Fink FUD has always been fashionable on this list, even 
when it is not backed up by facts (note that Fink doesn't force you to 
install ls, grep, or file - although heavy Fink user since the early 
days of Mac OSX 10.0, I have never installed any of these with Fink - 
that GNU libtool comes in a variety of versions and not all software 
will build with the one version that comes with Panther, that the Fink 
team is a major force in the development of GNU libtool for Darwin, that 
Apple does not supply any libXaw3d).

But here is a warning in the opposite direction: If you want to compile 
your own Unix software, whether with Fink or darwinports or "by hand", 
then do *not* install i-installer packages like libjpeg, libpng, libwmf, 
imagemagick and so on. The reason is that these packages install headers 
into /usr/local/include, libraries into /usr/local/lib, and some config 
scripts into /usr/local/bin. Every configure script and every 
preprocessor, compiler and linker will pick these up, if you want it or 
not, because these directories are in their standard search paths.

Some compilations will already break early on because of this, others 
will compile successfully, but the executables will be linked to these 
libraries, and when you later on update or remove the i-packages in 
question, your executables will crash. You also cannot run your 
executables on another machine, unless it has exactly the same 
collection of i-packages with the same versions installed.

Unlike the PATH variable for command line directory preferences, there 
are no easy to use environment variables that allow to hide /usr/local 
from the compiler tools. If you have the mentioned i-packages installed, 
you will find yourself moving the entire /usr/local out of the way 
before you can compile your software, and sometimes this is impossible 
if your software needs tex, for example, or ghostscript from 
/usr/local/bin, too.

-- 
Martin


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