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

[Dominic Hargreaves <dom@earth.li>]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 08:44:26PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Dominic Hargreaves <dom@earth.li> writes:
> 
> > Clearly it should not be a must at this point given the deviation:
> > though it still looks to me like a must ever since it was added to the
> > perl policy, so if it is changed it should be changed in both places.
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm looking for seconds for this patch to relax the current requirement
> back to a should.  After that, I think the next step would be to introduce
> automatic fixing of the #! line to debhelper, since that seems relatively
> uncontroversial, and then we can reconsider this later after that's had a
> chance to propagate through the archive.
> 
> --- a/perl-policy.xml
> +++ b/perl-policy.xml
> @@ -533,7 +533,7 @@ $(MAKE) OPTIMIZE="-O2 -g -Wall"</screen>
>        <title>Script Magic</title>
>  
>        <para>
> -        All packaged perl programs must start with
> +        All packaged perl programs should start with
>          <literal>#!/usr/bin/perl</literal> and may append such flags as
>          are required.
>        </para>
> diff --git a/policy/ch-files.rst b/policy/ch-files.rst
> index f31a3b4..bc87573 100644
> --- a/policy/ch-files.rst
> +++ b/policy/ch-files.rst
> @@ -186,7 +186,7 @@ All command scripts, including the package maintainer scripts inside the
>  package and used by ``dpkg``, should have a ``#!`` line naming the shell
>  to be used to interpret them.
>  
> -In the case of Perl scripts this must be ``#!/usr/bin/perl``.
> +In the case of Perl scripts this should be ``#!/usr/bin/perl``.
>  
>  When scripts are installed into a directory in the system PATH, the
>  script name should not include an extension such as ``.sh`` or ``.pl``

Seconded.