On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 11:17:14AM +0100, Sam Vilain wrote:
I think a better way to put this is that all changes to the OS owned directories should be made through the OS' native packaging system.
Even then, at least in the case of OS X, one can be bitten. I found an Installer package for perl 5.8 somewhere on the Net; it messed up my system perl pretty badly.
Well, that's partly because Mac OS X doesn't really have a native packaging system. Sure, there're downloadable .pkg installers, but since there's no way of telling which package put a file somewhere, or which version of the package did so, or what the version of the file is, or to see a list of the packages [0] nor to remove a package [1], I'm standing by the 'not really' part of that statement.
Personally this doesn't bother me, but then I don't futz with that nasty Unix stuff under the hood of Mac OS X very much either. On the other hand, apparently Panther has some sort of integrated ports/fink thing. This might help. On the gripping hand, new Perl installs are nicely versioned for Darwin, so installing Perls other than the system Perl will be easier.
[0] other than, possibly, reading the receipt file (/Library/Receipts) [1] [0] + and doing an rm manually
-- :: paul :: compiles with canadian cs1471 protocol
