Ahh, I know EXACTLY what you mean (hence the post). Super glad it helped!

*nod* cool. I’ve been around (Linux mostly) for about the same length of time – but only really adminning as little as I possibly could to to get my coding work done :)

Thanks for your feedback Gary – that’s super helpful. I’ve updated the post to reflect your advice.

Honestly, I’m happy to see someone willing to talk about it (as opposed to 6 year old abandoned posts) and have readable comments, because even down here it helps people find and decide the best answer for themselves (which is really what we all want – information enough to decide for ourselves). [ so maybe just point folks down here to the comments? ]

I have 20 years of UNIX development and admin experience, but I’m VERY new to Mac (which has it’s odd points), and I always try to leave any place in better shape than I found it.

So it’d be better to do the above soft link into /usr/local/lib, rather than /usr/lib ?

If so, I’ll update the above post.

I admit I’m at the edge of my knowledge re how the insides of these libraries and systems all interface. Mostly the above solution is “this worked without anything apparently breaking” rather than based on any deep technical understanding.

I /ALSO/ got around to testing (as from man dyld) that /usr/local/lib is ALSO a default fallback, and works as expected, so doing the softlink to that location is more “upgrade safe” than the links straight into /usr/lib.

Next on /my/ list is figuring out if there’s a way to make ‘mac ports’ project install directly to /usr/local instead of /opt/local.

Ahh, excellent suggestions. Thank you so much.

There’s definitely a world of subtlety around this stuff.

I’m surprised with the huge amount of searching I did that I didn’t find the DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH suggestion. Very surprised. Still, it’s here now, so I have it on record (in case I need it again) – and for that I thank you.

Ahh brilliant. Yeah, that was a massive pain in the ass until I figured that out.