Urania

MacPorts is an easy way to install a lot of programs. However, it does occasionally have glitches. I installed xephem, a very powerful astronomical ephemeris package, today using

sudo port install xephem

Everything worked fine except when I launched xephem, it couldn’t seem to find any of its ancillary data files. A quick search revealed that they were located in /opt/local/share/xephem/. I suspect because I previously used a manually installed version of xephem, it was searching for the ancillary files in /usr/local/xephem and not finding the data there. After reviewing the documentation for xephem the solution turned out to be simple. I was storing my private settings in the directory ~/.xephem and telling xephem to look in that directory using the following line in my ~/.xephemrc file

XEphem.PrivateDir: ~/.xephem

So all I did was open the file ~/.xephem/XEphem (capitalization important) and edit the line pointing to the shared directory to read:

XEphem.ShareDir: /opt/local/share/xephem/

That told xephem to look in the new location in the MacPorts directories and not the default one in /usr/local/xephem.

I guess RTFM can actually be important!