[mitchellh]

We used to do that, but we received SO MANY complaints that it wasn't instantly available on the PATH, that we symlinked into /usr/bin.

An alternate approach: Mac has some way to hook into shell profile loading so we should be able to inject a script somewhere that amends the PATH. This turns out to be a little crazy on Mac for some reason I don't remember, but should be possible.

Surprisingly, things are better here for Windows: Windows has an API call to both set environmental variables AND send messages to applications to refresh their environmental variables! So, Windows people have somewhat nice things.

Anyways, I'd love to improve this. The installer generators are open source, would be happy for any contributions: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-installers

[catinsocks]

Well I mean what's wrong with adding a file to /etc/paths.d which is picked up by the default shells using /usr/libexec/path_helper

It works for Mactex without fucking with the system folders.

[ygra]

On Windows you could probably just set an entry in App Paths. No need to modify the PATH environment variable at all.