Mac OS X applications that are launched by the Finder (e.g., by double clicking the associated.app folder) do not see environment variable settings you make for your Unix shell, say from a Terminal window or in your .bash_profile file. For these applications you must put your settings in a property list file that Mac OS X reads when you log in. That file is ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

Here are instructions for building and installing the PostgreSQL database server on a Mac OS X system. This includes instructions for using dscl to create a special user account to manage the database processes and data, and a sample launchd script to automatically launch the database server on system startup.

Here is what I did to my Mac OS X 10.4 environment to work with DocBook XML.