WordNet environment variables

[Ryan Schmidt]

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.

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.