On Saturday, March 1, 2003, at 02:40 PM, Jerry Rocteur wrote:

I use Perl extensively and have had no problems..

You forgot to add the important word 'yet'. Plenty of people who replaced their default Perl had no problems for a while. Until they tried to install Quicktime 6.0.2 and it failed.


In principle it is never a good idea to replace the stuff Apple sticks in /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, or /usr/sbin, or other standard directories the system is using and expecting a particular tool. Replacing things there can create oddball behaviors. For instance, replacing sh in 10.1 with bash (instead of zsh) will cause the Finder's 'connect to' to fail. You never know what weird things might happen, it is best to not tempt fate. You can always use /opt, /usr/local, or another path, to ensure everything gets along. Or use fink which by default works hard to not clobber anything.

The fact is in the best of all possible worlds nothing will break but there is a real chance oddball things will happen, and since is it quite simple to select an alternate place to install there is no reason not to do your installs wisely.

Regards,
Steven Bach



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