Messed up Perl

Brandon S Allbery KF8NH allbery at kf8nh.com
Mon Oct 4 11:04:01 PDT 2010


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On 10/3/10 19:11 , Hal Vaughan wrote:
> So, if I understand, MacPorts basically says, "I'm so important that I'm going to override your default settings and take over Perl for your entire system."  Isn't that about the case?  (I'm commenting on that issue in MacPorts, I hope it doesn't sound like it's directed at you.)

Other way around:  MacPorts modifies your personal $PATH to point to itself,
specifically so that the system continues to use the system's Perl.

As to "taking over", if you don't want to use MacPorts then why did you
install it in the first place?  It's entirely reasonable to assume that
someone who has installed MacPorts wants MacPorts programs to be available
in their $PATH.  If you want to change *where* it is in your $PATH, then
edit the PATH= line in ~/.profile.  Perl and other scripts, on the other
hand, should always specify exactly which interpreter they want in their #!
lines, because you may have several installed versions of a given
interpreter even with just the base OSX system, let alone
MacPorts/Fink/whatever.  (Get Info on *.py scripts on my SL iMac shows
several instances of "Python Runner", apparently installed as part of XCode.
 I imagine at least some of those are backed by their own separate python
executables.)

- -- 
brandon s. allbery     [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]      allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university      KF8NH
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