Max Horn wrote:
[]
He then got an error message by the installer, telling him about a
problem setting up his .profile. Luckily I was around and he knew that
I was somehow affiliated with this "Fink thingy". And indeed I managed
to "fix" the broken installation by changing his .profile to .bashrc
(no idea why this was necessary; interestingly, on my PowerBook, also
running 10.4, the exact opposite is the case: .profile works fine,
.bashrc apparently is being ignore). Well I already filed a bug report
for this (may not be our fault, but we still have to deal with it, I am
afraid).
There has been a bug report on this for a long time (#1020637). The
problem is that the pathsetup script, when run automatically by the
installer, sometimes suffers from a split personality syndrome: In the
middle of its execution, it seems to forget that it runs as $USER and
starts thinking it is root. Therefore it creates ~/.profile with root as
owner (but in the correct home directory of $USER) and worse, when it
tests whether the new setting works, it does the test as root and
concludes that it doesn't work.
The only thing usually necessary to repair this is to run
sudo chown $USER ~/.profile
after the installation. Putting the "source /sw/bin/init.sh" into
~/.bashrc is not considered good practice, because .bashrc is executed
in every subshell, but not in a login shell.
I would have repaired the pathsetup script a long time ago (and I have
an improved version here) if only this problem could be reproduced
reliably. I can tell you that I ran many hours of tests and have run the
Fink installer probably a couple of hundred times with all kinds of
settings, but the problem is that you don't know what exact environment
the Apple installer runs its postflight script in. In theory it runs
with root privileges, but with $HOME and $USER set to the user who runs
the installer. Some other information like the user's login shell is
imported from netinfo etc, but you don't know what exactly.
In any case, I think we have a lot less complaints now since pathsetup
is run automatically with the installer compared to the time when we
recommended to do this after the installation.
--
Martin
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