Puneet Kishor writes: > On a related note -- Nat, please, if you could summarize how fink > trashed your system so much that you had to reinstall... that might be > as great a help as creating a perl dmg. Fink makes a very big issue of > how it protects your system by installing under /sw, and remaining > separate from the system. Seems like while it does all that, it also > has to capability of hosing the system.
It's only suspicion on my part, because it's six months of compiling software. I think the big hassle came with my upgrading to the latest Fink--I think that broke the Perl I'd installed, which had inadvertently trashed the system Perl. However, I'd several times interrupted fink attempting to compile things from source, and I wonder whether one of those might have give me the GNU du in /usr/bin instead of in /sw. I'm not certain enough to blame fink for that. > why? I could have lived with a messy Fink upgrade. I'd just rm -rf /sw and reinstall. I could also have lived with a broken Perl. I'd just rm -rf /Library/Perl and /System/Library/Perl and reinstall Perl. But finding a stray du in /usr/bin scared the crap out of me, and at that point I didn't know how much of my system was no longer standard. Anyone else could live with that. I have to edit books where we claim that things work a particular way on OS X. We've already been bitten--fink's du has a -h option that Apple's du doesn't, and without realizing it we described -h in "Learning Unix for Mac OS X, 2ed". So I really need a clean sane system. Nat
