Should we have programs with executable permissions in the distro

[Nicholas Clark]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2010 at 11:34:34PM +1000, Vasily Chekalkin wrote:
> >> Does it have any disadvantage to set it from "#! perl" to
> >> "#!/usr/bin/perl"?
> >>
> >> Also: "#! parrot"  ->  "#!/usr/bin/parrot"
> >>
> >> This is my favorite.
> >
> > Surely the #! for perl should be the path of the perl used to run Configure.pl,
> > and the #! for parrot be the path parrot will be installed to?
> >
> > /usr/bin/perl and /usr/bin/parrot may not even exist.
> 
> Indeed. What about "#!/usr/bin/env perl"? I'm not sure how it works on Windows.

I don't know for sure about Windows. I believe that interpreter choice is
determined by looking up the extension in the registry, but I may well be
wrong. (#! line and file permissions are not used)

However, I believe that this will still cause problems on *nix in a couple of
cases:

1: perl isn't on your $PATH
2: The first perl on your $PATH isn't new enough

whereas the path of the perl you ran won't suffer from either problem
(Configure.pl will reject if early if it's too old.)

Nicholas Clark