Note, however, that the current incantation of dh_compress -Xexamples will not compress *anything* in examples, including non-executable script text files.
As per my email this usage is lazy. It should be "dh_compress -X.pl". I am not bothered by this as I think it should be dealt with on a case by case basis and it worked in this case at the time.
If we decide to go along with this change, then we should ask Joey Hess to modify debhelper such that: if a file installed into examples/ is +x, then do not compress it. As mentioned earlier, likely this feature cannot appear before debhelper compat 9. In the meantime, we can establish a policy to add these lines (dh_compress -Xexamples) wherever scripts are installed into examples/.
No I do not believe this is required. If overrides are bad thing then dh_installexamples needs to fix bad shebangs and broken permissions.
I have looked at the Debian policy but I realize now that my practice is fully compliant with Debian policy (although perhaps my overrides could be tightened up to be more robust).
Plain text documentation should be installed in the directory /usr/share/doc/package, where package is the name of the package, and compressed with gzip -9 unless it is small.
First of all scripts are arguably not plain text documentation.Secondly the policy only says "small" so we can take a view on each package what is small. That already provides the latitutde to consider the tradeoffs between diskspace and end user friendliness.