coreutils ls color (was: another question...)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 10, 2011, at 10:04, Rodolfo Aramayo wrote:

> On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 09:47, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> MacPorts used to optionally allow users to install GNU programs without their "g" prefix, thus making them override the BSD versions provided by Mac OS X. This caused many problems within MacPorts so we removed this possibility and changed it to install the unprefixed versions in a separate directory. Users are now welcome to add that unprefixed directory to their PATH if they wish, which at least means that software built using MacPorts will not be affected (because MacPorts does not use your PATH). You can read more about the problem here if you're interested:
>> 
>> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/20748
> 
> I agree and you are right GNU and BSD can be very different
> 
> Now if MacPorts does not use my PATH certainly Apple will not either, so the problem will be restricted to programs not installed by either Apple or MacPorts, which is a minority..??

I would say that by putting GNU versions of programs in your PATH, you could cause problems for some software that you compile by hand (i.e. not using MacPorts).

> Interestingly I was not aware of that you guys had run into problems before...which begs the question: why did you? you just told me that MacPorts does not use my  paths so why was MacPorts software compilation affected by the PATH set by the user??

MacPorts uses its own definition of PATH, which includes /opt/local/bin first. The problem was that we let users install unprefixed GNU versions of programs into /opt/local/bin. The user wasn't modifying their PATH; the programs were being installed into a location that was already in the user's (and MacPorts') PATH. This could therefore cause problems for any other program installed using MacPorts.