On Jul 14, 2006, at 20:37, Mat S. wrote:
On Jul 14, 2006, at 8:31 PM, Ryan R. wrote:
I would not modify anything in /usr/bin directly. Apple assumes that
the system /usr/bin is theirs and unmodified and will (and have!) change
things there in updates without warning - possibly breaking your
modifications and potentially causing serious system problems.
Installing in /usr/local and prepending it to your path is the usual
unix way of doing things.
Just to speak on this point, I’ve been safely using the replacement
solution for about 6 months now with no trouble at all. But the one
thing I did after I moved /usr/bin/ruby is to make a link from
/opt/local/bin/ruby (my darwinports installation) to /usr/bin/ruby.
Pathing works most of the time, but I had some problems with
RadRails/Eclipse because it doesn’t appear to honor pathing provided in
.profile or .login.
I have become convinced that not completely obliterating the
Apple-default Ruby is a mistake. The fact that my 1.8.4 politely put
itself next to, instead of on top of, the 1.6.8 Jaguar Ruby has
repeatedly caused malfunctions and path errors.
-
First there was the whole “hey, I installed it but it doesn’t work”
thing that requires learning the voodoo of .bash_profile (yea, yea,
many of you can’t even remember when you didn’t know about it, but
finding the documentation that answered the question “why do I get the
wrong Ruby?” is a bitch, since it requires learning quite a bit of new
vocabulary before you can even search for the answer.) -
I got to do it all over again when I installed RubyCocoa, since
.frameworks don’t give a diddly-dang what’s in your .bash-profile, and
the 1.8.4 Ruby compile/install hadn’t hunted down an earlier
Ruby.framework. Debugging THAT one was extremely difficult, involving
running “lsof” on my compiled program, discovering that XCode had
found, and was using, a different Ruby.framework than the one I knew
about, and trashing it. -
Two days ago, I once again had a Ruby program fail because it’s
running the wrong Ruby, and I eventually had to give up on this one. My
text editing program lets me run text through shell scripts as text
filters; so I wrote a Ruby script to pretty-format HTML. Except I can’t
run it, because all the gems are installed into 1.8.4. The scripts
inherit their environment from the text editor, which inherits it from
the Finder, which does not use ~/.bash_login, nor /etc/profile, nor
/etc/bashrc, nor any other file which I can find on my system.
[It’s using SOMETHING, because it has
PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Users/dave, which isn’t what you
get from “bash --noprofile”]
This time, I just gave up and hard-coded #!/usr/local/bin/ruby
Next time, I’ll probably erase the entire 1.6.8 code base from my
system, and replace it with links to my 1.8.4.
[OK, so this time, I hard-coded
#!/Library/Ruby/bin/ruby
but that’s a different kettle of fish. There’s a hard link in
/usr/local/bin for the non-zero number of Ruby-related programs that
think paths are legally regulated or something. Not many people appear
to have noticed that Apple installs scripting languages in /Library or
/System/Library, not in invisible folders, except for the command-line
binaries for the languages, which are in /usr/bin. ]
