On 4 March 2012 21:58, Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mar 4, 2012, at 14:12, Brandon Allbery wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 11:28, Sam Kuper wrote:
>>> In any case, shouldn't MacPorts set them automatically (and,
>>> presumably, also unset them if MacPorts is later used to uninstall
>>> WordNet)?
>>
>> That means editing people's shell profiles (which might be ~/.profile or 
>> ~/.bash_profile, or potentially others) or possibly 
>> ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist on install and again on removal.  This is 
>> generally not a good idea; there are too many ways for it to go wrong, 
>> because it's not designed to be edited that way.
>>
>> (Linux can do it not because the files are different but because the 
>> systemwide versions of the files specifically check for additional settings 
>> files; OS X doesn't do this and editing Apple's startup files is not a good 
>> idea because the worst case failure mode is you run Software Update and 
>> thereafter no longer can log in.)
>
> Right. MacPorts ports don't edit your environment. If you need environment 
> variables set, edit your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile or wherever you 
> typically do that and do it there manually.

Ah, OK; thank you.

> MacPorts itself does a one-time modification to your profile to edit the 
> PATH, so that you can more easily run MacPorts and the software it installs.

I knew about this modification, which is why I was surprised that the
WordNet environment variables weren't also set by MacPorts; but I
hadn't realised that this was the only modification of this kind that
MacPorts makes.

Thanks, folks

Sam
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