steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

    I have tested this concept on FreeBSD by having multiple terminals open and running 5 or so different port install processes simultaneously, but I have never actually thought much about it until today on OS X. I was initially always very careful to install only one port/application at a time on my FreeBSD machines - I wasn't sure whether the compilation and installation of the software would cause conflicting libraries to be installed, but I found out that the library concept used in Windows is not really the way things work under most *nix distros. So, after some testing of this theory by actually running multiple installations of related and unrelated programs at the same time, it didn't ever appear to effect the end result - i.e. whether or not the program properly ran on the machine. Today, however, I found myself in a slightly different situation and don't know if there is a straight forward answer.
    I was installing Microsoft Office (gasp! - well, I do really need it sometimes for docs sent to me that cannot be properly read by OpenOffice) and at the same time compiling Gimp for the X11 side of my machine (i.e. not the native OS X version that is apparently out there). I was wondering: because one is basically a binary installation and the other a compilation process (very similar to the port installation routine under FreeBSD), is there a way that those installations could conflict with one another, and if so, how? My gut instinct is that the answer is no - but there are always exceptions to the norm and I am wondering what those exceptions might be. For the two people out there who read this weblog, maybe I will be lucky enough to find out without having to do too much research... Comments are very welcome.