MacOS X building instructions

[BPFowler]

Interesting. When I installed Fink + Fink Commander yesterday, I don't recall it pointing out any of this when I fired it up for the first time. I'm new to Macs (as of a few days ago), but so far at least, my experience had been that when you install a new (pre-compiled) program, it runs, and there's no need to dig into documentation unless you run across something you don't understand. In every obvious respect at least, Fink Commander had been working fine for me so far.

fink should explain this to you on its first run, and I would imagine that Fink Commander should as well, if you think that this was not happening for you, and you installed fink following the fink instructions, then this sounds like a defect in fink, and you you should submit it as a bug to fink .

See the First Time Installation guide for fink.

Yes, the Mac interface prides itself on the ease of installing programs, and their being highly usable without early recourse to manuals or online help. Whether this can be readily transferred to libraries such as wxWidgets or programmers' tools such as fink is a question that is still not totally solved...

Yes. It's what I've been using for 20 years, and no one had ever offered a reason why I should change. It gave me Emacs-style command-line editing and other benefits before other shells I knew about had that. If there's another shell (bash?) that I'd be better off with, I'm certainly willing to consider it, as long as the change isn't too painful.

I was asking because the syntax needed in .rc files for the csh/tcsh differs from bash. bash is the more popular, and Apple switched the default from tcsh to bash with Panther. Someone is only likely to be using tcsh if they have deliberately set things that way, and I thought that it was more likely that I had misunderstood something. Sorry if my enquiry caused offence.

Note that you will be needed to look at a command like

source /sw/bin/init.csh

and not the one I erroneously quoted.