On Mar 11, 2008, at 7:56 PM, Alex Zavatone wrote:

The better solution is to create a file called '.profile' in your home directory. In this file you specify additional directories that are to be scanned for executables and manual entries. The MacPorts installation fails to create this file, so you have to create it manually.

Awesome. Works like a charm on my other mac. Why doesn't the .DMG installer do this?

No "non compiler friendly" user is going to be able to get up and running without this information.

What has been written to the .profile file has little to do with compilation. This is a facility of the shell to make it easier for users to run commands. Instead of typing the full path you can type just the name of the executable you wish to run.

If the operating system wouldn't have the same settings for directories like /bin/ or /usr/sbin/ then you would have to type /bin/ls to get a directory listing and /usr/sbin/diskutil to run the command line version of Disk Utility.