X11 environment variables on MacBook Pro

Question

Hi
I have just got my new MacBook Pro and have installed Gimp to run using x11 that came on the apple installation disks however I can't seem to get the xterm to configure correctly.
GIMP is installed under /sw/bin but the default PATH for x11 does not include this location so I added PATH=$PATH:/sw/bin:/sw/sbin to a newly created .bash_profile. But x11 did not seem to use this file although terminal worked OK.
After doing a bit of research, I then created a .bashrc file with the PATH defined and changed the .bash_profile to source .bashrc with no other entries.
Again this worked OK for Terminal but now when I type 'echo $Path' in an x11 xterm the PATH displays two entries for /sw/bin & /sw/sbin. i.e.
$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/sw/bin:/sw/sbin:/sw/bin:/sw/sbin
Any ideas why? and how can I correct it?
Macbook Pro 17   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

Sorry this was a bit brief; I think I was still asleep when I typed it.
The reasons are these:
1. Many fink programs require environment variables and other settings. When you source that init.sh file, it ensures everything is set up to work out of the box. (Among the things it does is to in turn source every relevant file in /sw/etc/profile.d -- take a look in it to see what, if anything, is in there). There is also some code to keep your path trimmed properly, so you don't get repeats pasted on.
2. Bash is unique in that either .bashrc or .bash_profile, but not both, get sourced. In a rooted X11 environment, everything works properly, but on OS X, where X11 is "rootless," it leads to unexpected behavior like what you saw. As long as you put everything into one file and then tell the other one to source its contents, you should be ok.
You can also run X11 stuff from Apple's terminal, provided you somewhere in a startup file have something to set the DISPLAY variable, usually to .0.
I've put more discussion of these things here