On Feb 17, 2009, at 10:02, Peter Dyballa wrote:
Am 17.02.2009 um 16:03 schrieb Martin Costabel:
In ~/.xinitrc (or in the scripts inside ~/.xinitrc.d/, which is the currently recommended replacement for ~/.xinitrc), you get an environment inherited directly from /usr/X11/bin/startx as started by launchd.
This is a well-know fact. Therefore I have created ~/.MacOSX/ environment.plist.
This is a minimalist environment that does not take into account *any* shell startup scripts, and not even ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist.
Why? The previous version in MacPorts worked OK, it inherited $PATH and I could use AUCTeX. Carbon Emacsen or the Cocoa variant Emacs.app of GNU Emacs 23.0.90 all inherit the correct environment and are useful applications. Is X11.app no Mac OS X application?
Here's how X11.app starts on Tiger (or on Leopard if you aren't using the launchd start): X11.app inherits its environment from environment.plist just like any other app launched by ApplicationServices. X11.app runs a shell script on startup that gets an environment from your login shell before launching the X11 binary. The X11 binary fork/execs startx startx fork/execs xinit xinit fork execs xinitrc and X X tells X11.app how to star the server (command line arguments passed over mach IPC) xinitrc runs your initial clients (like quartz-wm) Thus xinitrc inherits your environment.plist on Tiger. It doesn't on Leopard because it's started from launchd which doesn't use environment.plist on Leopard (known bug).