[PPL-devel] Re: [SWIPL] Suggestion for the DarwinPorts version of SWI-Prolog

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Roberto Bagnara <bagnara at cs.unipr.it> wrote:
	I may well be missing something, but it seems the life of people
	interfacing C/C++ and Prolog programs on MacOS would be simplified
	if SWI-Prolog.h and the other interface header file could be installed
	in some fixed place, such as /opt/local/include, as well as in
	/opt/local/lib/swipl-x.y.zz/include.

Yes, you are missing something, and no, my life would not be simplified.
If a package installs things in a fixed place, then I cannot install it.
Nohow.

Let me explain why.
This university has a policy that if a machine is connected to the
University net, then it MUST be administered ONLY by an approved system
administrator who is basically responsible for keeping antivirus stuff
up to date, installing the approved e-mail software, and basically
ensuring that bad stuff doesn't happen.  ONLY the approved system
administrator is allowed to know the root password.

It doesn't matter who *owns* the machine.  I have an old Sun-3/50 and
a 486 PC in my office which *could* be connected to the net, and I'm
about to get a past-its-wow-gosh-date Windows NT box ditto.  But if I
want them connected to the University net, I will NOT be allowed to know
what the root password is, even though they're my machines.  The G4 Mac
running MacOS X and the SunBlade100 running Solaris 2.9 that sit side-by-side
on my desk, on which I do my real work, belong to the University, and there
is no way that they are ever going to let me have the root password on those
machines as long as they are connected to the University net.

This means that I *cannot* install software that puts things in /usr or
/opt or *anywhere* except my own directory or /tmp.  If I want such
software to be installed, I have to ask the appropriate system administrator
nicely (different sysadmins for the Solaris box and the MacOS X box, by
the way), and wait for them to fetch the software, check it out for
unrighteousness, and install it, in their own good time.  (These are busy
people.)  I had to wait months for one such package.

	P.S. BTW, why /opt/local instead of /usr/local?
	
>From my Solaris box:
    % man -s 5 filesystem
     /opt  Root of a subtree for add-on application packages.

     The file system mounted on /usr contains  platform-dependent
     and  platform-independent sharable files.

On the MacOS X box it's "man 7 hier" instead of "man -s 5 filesystem"
and there isn't any /opt.