On Sat, Aug 25, 2012 at 08:25:54PM +0200, Hans Aberg wrote:
On Mac OS X, one can change the system PATH by putting stuff in some directory somewhere, but then it is read in its own order (alphabetical probably). This is how it gets the wrong order.
Hmmmm
As far as I know, 'which' just uses PATH. I have a ~/bin/ directory; here is test:
Maybe it was changed for the better. I ran into this on a Leopard install and as you can imagine; this led to some subtle and hard to trace trouble.
It would not work if the user has a custom version. The standard way, that ism what I have seen on most packages, is that 'make install' puts binaries in /usr/local/bin/, docs in /usr/local/share/doc/chuck/, and examples in /usr/local/share/chuck/examples/.
Then one uses a prefix variable that can be changed from the default /usr/local/.
There is a "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" which BSD/GNU Linux system largely adheres to.
It might be simpler to forget about a custom install for before 10.7 Mac OS X.
Maybe the core of the issue is that OSX users, for very understandable reasons, are not used to installing binaries to the terminal's path. Most of the time they will install GUI applications but for better or worse those are not normally in the terminal's path. Following UNIX traditions and keeping people who already know their way around that sort of thing happy is probably easier than making things easy to use and understand for people new to that layer. Oh, well, it's a interesting set of questions. I'd be inclined to take the lazy route now and stick to how it is and has been. /usr/bin in a fine place for executables too. It's not a "core system" thing, but that's a bit moot on OSX as you can't really boot just a core system (with no GUI, etc) anyway. I liked the "homebrew" idea too as that takes a lot of the fuzz off the user. Less fuzz it better terminals and CMD.exe already turn out to be big enough a challenge. Kas.