Hey you unix folks, In my quest to as much non-system stuff off of the boot partition, I figured that the next target ought to be the /usr/local directory. [translations: boot partition: the place where my OS X is installed. /usr/local directory: standard place for Unix applications to put themselves 'usr' for user 'local' for a customization.]
Has anyone done something like making a Local folder on the Foo partition, and then running ln -s /Volumes/Foo/Local /usr/local and then running the hack which was on macosxhints sudo defaults write com.apple.installer FollowLinks -boolean true to make installers follow the symlink? [translations: ln makes symbolic links -s makes the link soft (soft links are akin to aliases in the MacOS, though the two are a little different.) the whole ln -s command is similar to placing an alias to the Local folder on the drive Foo in the usr folder on the boot partition, and then nameing the alias 'local' the hack from macosxhints (supposedly) makes installers follow the symlinks to install their stuff instead of looking at them, thinking that they are garbage files, and overwriting them with their own stuff. The prefix 'sudo' says to run the command as the super user, so that all installers will trust the setting.] I'd like to install a wad of packages (R, some fancy version of python, a newer build of emacs, etc.), and I'd like to avoid scattering them, so that they can find each other and interact, but I don't want to put them on the system partition. [Translations: R is a statistical package. Python is a scripting language which is good for processing text and can be used on all platforms. Named after Monty Python. emacs is an editor which is really powerful, but has a lot of stand-on-right-foot-while-clicking-escape-q keyboard shortcuts. I like it because it does dynamic expansion of abbreviations.] <rant>This question reminds me of why I originally liked the Mac so much: I could rely on the OS to keep up with applications in strange places. I really dislike this type of hacking to keep a system relatively clean.</rant> [Translations: <tag> is the code in html (the web page language) for starting a block of text to have a particular style. </tag> is the code for ending the style.] Bill | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
