Re: mac osx terminal instructions

[Hans Aberg]

On 9 Mar 2010, at 11:59, James Lowe wrote:

> > > Currently, the instructions on getting LilyPond up and running in  
> > > a terminal on mac osx have the user create a script which calls  
> > > the lilypond application, and then add the location of the script  
> > > to the $PATH. Is there any advantage of this over just having the  
> > > user add the location of the lilypond binary to the $PATH?
> > They are different: LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/ has other  
> > stuff in it than just the lilypond programs, for example ps2pdf. If  
> > one adds this location to the environment variable PATH, one must  
> > decide which version of these to call.
>
> From a user's point of view why is it done like this? Why have two  
> 'bin' locations and not just put it all in
>
> LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin/

I'm not sure what you have in mind here. On BSD systems, like Mac OS  
X, /usr/local/bin/ is the traditional location for user installed UNIX  
programs - they typically end up there when doing 'make install'.  
Apple added /Applications/ to make sure these are not confused with  
those; they contain a UNIX program, of course, but are otherwise  
"bundles" - directories containing a lot of other resources.

Among the resources the LilyPond Application adds are some UNIX  
programs it uses. The idea is to get the right versions. In fact it  
doesn't: guile will call the stuff /usr/local/ even if LilyPond has  
its own stuff. So I have to go into the Terminal and change some  
library whenever I want to switch between using my Guile in /usr/local  
and lilypond.

> > But one could add /usr/local/bin/ before the Lilypond directory. In  
> > addition, I have paths to MacPorts /opt/, Fink /sw/, and TeX-Live / 
> > usr/local/texlive/ TeX.
>
> After my problems with getting Mac OS to work in Terminal (I just  
> needed to RTFM) I noticed that I had a .profile in my own account,  
> now I know that default users (admin or otherwise) do not have  
> a .profile so I must have created it ...

As James Bailey pointed out, the package managers may add it - though  
I thought it was Fink; perhaps both do.

  Hans