Modification of .profile

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 19, 2015, at 2:09 AM, Rainer Mülle rwrote:

> On 2015-10-15 23:22, Bachsau wrote:
>> May I suggest to add an option for the PKG installer to disable
>> automativ modification of user's ~/.profile file? On my system I
>> modified my /etc/paths file to include MacPorts ater my own
>> /usr/local. When I installed a new version by using the PKG today, I
>> found my .profile and PATH modified without request.
> 
> The postflight script should only modify your shell configuration files
> if your PATH does not yet contain a reference to /opt/local [1]. If it
> was set up in /etc/paths, this should have prevented additional
> modifications.
> 
> I don't know if package installers support custom options or optional
> components. Maybe someone else can comment on this.

Well it's certainly possible to have optional components. Just take a look at the installers for Xcode 3.x and earlier. The Xcode 3.2.6 installer, for example, had the Mac OS X 10.4 SDK as an optional install that could be turned on, and the command line tools and iOS SDK were options that could be turned off. If it were important to offer this, we could easily have profile modification as a separate option in the installer. But I would think most if not all users would want the MacPorts prefix to be in their path. And if there's a problem where MacPorts modifies the profile even if the MacPorts prefix is already in the path, then that could be a bug that we should fix.