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I think it could be argued that the average software developer should know how PATH works and how to edit their shell's dotfile. So "most users" may not know how to do this, but they really should. It doesn't take that long to learn and it will help out tremendously. Compared to all the fancy web frameworks and complex languages, editing a dotfile is relatively simple and the skills involved are not likely to "go out of style" any time soon.

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And to the extent to which someone doesn't know how paths or shell profiles work, they end up getting burned eventually. Is this a sane complexity? Maybe not. But if so--and to be clear, I would totally be willing to believe it is a sane complexity!--then whose fault is it? I think probably Apple, as I don't think they offer something like /etc/profile.d? We can fix it by education, not by pretending it isn't a problem. We can fix it by changing how shells work (though adding features to shells has no guarantee Apple will bother updating them; maybe they will start now that they moved to zsh?). When we say "developers shouldn't have to know about how X works" and then try to solve that by adding some rickety automation we don't solve the underlying problem: we create a second problem.

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