Bug#906901: debian-policy: Perl script shebang requirement is disturbing and inconsistent with rest of policy

[Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>]

Package: debian-policy
Version: 4.2.0.1
Severity: serious

The recent addition to the Debian Policy to require a Perl shebang of
/usr/bin/perl is inconsistent with the rest of script usage, and hinders
the user/system administrator to freely override Perl.

If a user/system admin wants to replace Perl by prepending the path to
a self compiled Perl to the PATH, it is his right to do so, and Perl
scripts are expected to follow this decision. It is the obligation of
the one doing the change to ensure proper availability of modules and
support files.

Package maintainers are free to use the more restrictive /usr/bin/perl
shebang when the consider it necessary, but this must not be a
requirement in the policy.

I hereby suggest removing this line
	In the case of Perl scripts this must be "#!/usr/bin/perl".
from policy 10.4.

Sincerely yours

Norbert


-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.18.3 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages debian-policy depends on:
ii  libjs-sphinxdoc  1.7.6-1

debian-policy recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
pn  doc-base  <none>

-- no debconf information
Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
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