Please uh oh: [OS X TeX] set environment variables for applications

[Will Robertson]

On 25 May 2004, at 0:43, Enrico Franconi wrote:

> On 24 May 2004, at 15:15, Gerben Wierda wrote:
>> Changing /etc/profile is different, mainly because historically the
>> command line apps have been written with this in mind.
>
> As you already know, I disagree with this statement: if your 
> i-Installer is allowed to mess up with the general settings (inherited 
> by ALL applications) in /etc/profile, sensible people should be 
> allowed to do sensible stuff in the environment.plist file.

There's the rub, it sounds like: ``sensible people''and ``sensible 
things''.

I mean, surely simply adding paths to the plist couldn't harm anything, 
and would add functionality to emacs (although why emacs couldn't 
figure it out by itself? Couldn't a few extra lines in .emacs fix the 
problem?).

On the other hand, going in and changing other weird stuff is bound to 
break something eventually---especially something as fragile as a TeX 
install.

I wouldn't trust a point-and-click Mac user to know enough to know what 
``sensible'' is. And I know I wouldn't trust *myself* to know...

W

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