[Openmcl-devel] OSX install difficulties

[Dan Knapp]

> You're correct, the file names are wrong in those two examples, they 
> should be reversed. Dan, the example in 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 should be 
> respectively:

   See?  Pays to read all of your mail before replying to any of it. ^_^ 
  Fixed, thanks.

> I have no idea how I sent something that backwards to you... seems 
> like GB's commented more than once on the dangers of copy and paste. 
> If you're unpacking both it's an invisible problem but as Francis 
> found out unpacking the src archive doesn't get you anything to 
> bootstrap the latest dev CVS stuff with, and probably in fact would 
> blow away your dev working copy.

   Yeah.  Being aware of that sort of danger, I kept telling myself I 
should try these directions out
myself to see whether they could be followed, but I still haven't...

> hat's because double-clicking the archive unpacks it with unstuffit, 
> which doesn't want to blow away a folder, while tar expects to unpack 
> into a potentially-existing library. That's behavior so old in the Mac 
> that I took it for granted, do you think it's worth pointing out on 
> the web site docs?

   Of course!  If everybody had the same background knowledge, there 
would be no need for
documentation.  (May have something to do with why some software 
projects don't have
any....)  I've already added a note about that particular effect, as 
mentioned in my last email.

   If you can think of anything else that should be mentioned about 
Mac/Unix differences, by
all means either write something up, or mention the issue and I will.

>>  This morning I couldn't expand with "tar xvzf" an archive downloaded 
>> by
>> ftp in "text" mode ( Mac Os 10.3.5 ) as I had read it was the way to
>>  go, then downloaded in "Binary" mode and could "tar xvzf" the 
>> archive !
>
> Um... I'd expect that, wouldn't you expect that? Downloading something 
> as text will typically do end-of-line marker conversion. Why under 
> 10.3.5 that doesn't mean converting LFs to LFs, I wouldn't know, but a 
> tarred, gzipped archive is binary and any conversion would probably be 
> bad. Again, if this was a surprise for you let me know and I might put 
> a note in the docs, to some degree this may be another discrepancy 
> between a Linux->Mac OS X transitioner's POV vs. a long-standing Mac 
> person's POV, worth noting for other Mac people who aren't used to 
> tarring.

   Clearly it was a surprise. :)  Also as I said in my last email, I do 
think it's appropriate to
document this, I'm just not quite sure where or what to say.

-- Dan Knapp