Alain,
To solve this problem you have three options:
- create ~/.MacOSX$ cat environment.plist (if it doesn't already
exist) and insert something like { PATH = '~/bin:/usr/local/ bin:...';}
Now i think that ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist is not useful ? perhaps i'm wrong ...
It is actually very useful: the environment.plist is for the OS adequate to the .profile for your terminal. All programs trying to open a shell (to execute commandos) will use settings in that file as environment. Since I use python scripts in more apps than Terminal and TextMate I chose that way to have my PATH (and LC_TYPE for that) propagated.
in my profile i've [...] and /usr/bin is used before /usr/local/bin with the bad link in the first !
Well if this is working for you - so be it. There is no right or wrong, it just might happen that you have to modify some more pointer once you installed more external software. The normal UNIX schema would be to put generic programs into /usr/bin and (machine) specific programs into /usr/local/bin - so the later path would normally be loaded before the former. Most of the install packages honor these schematics and put stuff into /usr/local/...
However the final step is a matter of preference. If what you did is working for you, it's fine. Just keep in mind that there are actually different possible solutions when you have access to a different machine (or have to deploy you work).
greetings Wolfgang