Added support in MacPorts base to set PATH and MANPATH automatically in Leopard

[Adam Mercer]

On 29/11/2007, James Berry <jberry at macports.org> wrote:
>
> On Nov 29, 2007, at 6:16 AM, Adam Mercer wrote:
>
> > On 29/11/2007, James Berry <jberry at macports.org> wrote:
> >
> >> The only way to turn it off is to manually remove or modify the files
> >> installed by macports. Note that having the paths in your PATHs twice
> >> shouldn't hurt anything and probably adds minimal performance
> >> slowdown
> >> only in the failure case.
> >>
> >> One enhancement we could potentially make would be to not overwrite
> >> versions of these files. That way, if you remove their contents once,
> >> subsequent versions of MacPorts would not overwrite you change. The
> >> downside of that is that if we wanted to push out changes to these
> >> files, it would be less-clear how to update existing users.
> >>
> >> Comments, anyone?
> >
> > Could an option be added to configure to disable installing these at
> > all, obviously the default should be to install them.
>
> Yes, that's certainly a possibility, but I'm not sure it's worth the
> time and added complexity. Can you explain your objection to the
> double paths, other than on aesthetic grounds? ;)

I suppose that the only objection I have is due to aesthetic reasons,
I can't think of a problem that would be caused by having double
paths.

However one problem comes to mind, related to the MacPorts paths
appearing after the system paths, is that the python_select and
gcc_select scripts will no longer function correctly.  As /usr/bin is
in the path before /opt/local/bin the system python and gcc will take
precedence over the symlinks created by python_select and gcc_select
which seems to defeat the purpose of these scripts.

Cheers

Adam