Re: Rationale behind script-not-executable lintian warning

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi lintian maintainers,

Thijs Kinkhorst <kink@squirrelmail.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 12:25 +0100, Bas Wijnen wrote:
>> Then it seems logical to me that an override would be in order.  However, I
>> don't understand what the check is for, if not for cases like these.  So my
>> logic may very well be incorrect.
>
> Many tests document a short rationale in their description; it would be
> good to add this for tests where it doesn't exist. For example by
> sending patches to the BTS.

Good idea, but first we should know the rationale.

The warning we are talking about is

W: tetex-base: script-not-executable ./usr/share/texmf-tetex/scripts/context/ruby/texmfstart.rb
N:
N:   This file starts with the #! sequence that marks interpreted scripts,
N:   but it is not executable.
N:

In this particular case, upstream decided that the script should contain
a shebang line (and a couple of possible reasons for this have been
given on -mentors), and I'm wondering why lintian doesn't like it like
this.  The script is not meant to be executed on a Debian system, just
called internally, so there's no need for the shebang line;  but I also
don't see the need for removing it, thus cluttering the diff.gz with
useless hunks.

Or not so useless as I'd like to learn from you.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer