[R-SIG-Mac] Setting environment variables, especially http_proxy and ftp_proxy

[Simon Urbanek]

Paul,

On Apr 7, 2006, at 6:19 PM, Paul Roebuck wrote:

> True. I just run my "check" and "INSTALL" from Terminal.app so this  
> has never caused me any issues. And on regular Un*x, xterm would  
> have been launched by the shell.

No, that's not quite true - it's launched by the wm which in turn is  
launched by X11, so it is not started by the shell (login shell to be  
more precise) and thus never read .profile. However, depending on  
your X11 setup, you can tell xterm to process .profile, but the  
default setting for Apple X11 is not to (and it's default for some  
other unix systems, too).

> Since R.app reads .Renviron anyway, this method has been adequate  
> for my multi-environment needs;

If .Renviron is sufficient, that's fine, but as others were pointing  
out, R_LIBS for example must be set before that.

> if you use other Mac OS X applications, the Mac-specific  
> environment.plist route is the way to go.
>
> Must admit to being surprised about 'open' though. Would have  
> thought that (when run from Terminal.app) would have passed on the  
> shell's environment.
>

I must admit that you got me there :). In fact `open' actually passes  
the parent environment to the LS, although the documentation says the  
otherwise - interesting. Thanks for that one - this is definitely  
handy for testing things ...

Cheers,
Simon