Re: Question about PERL_PATH

Ian Abbott venit, vidit, dixit 06.05.2011 15:30:

The Gentoo ebuilds for git have started invoking 'make' with the option
'PERL_PATH=/usr/bin/env perl'.  This doesn't seem to cause any problems
except when running git instaweb, which outputs an error similar to the
following:

Well, it means that all our perl scripts are run with the perl which is
the first in PATH at run time (for the user running it), which may or
may not be the one which is first in PATH at build or test time (for the
user running that).

Of course there's no problem when they are the same.

/usr/libexec/git-core/git-instaweb: line 135: /usr/bin/env perl: No such
file or directory

There is an easy workaround, which is to modify the invocation of perl
in the httpd_is_ready() function in the git-instaweb shell script.  It
currently invokes perl as "$PERL" (with the quotes).  Removing the
quotes makes it work.

My question is, should git support Gentoo's unusual setting of PERL_PATH
as a multi-word command, or should Gentoo patch around the problem they
have created with git-instaweb themselves?

There is one other place where $PERL is used in git-instaweb and that is
in the mongoose_conf() function.  It has a heredoc that puts the
following line in the httpd.conf file (subject to shell variable expansion):

cgi_interp	$PERL

For Gentoo, that would get expanded to the following:

cgi_interp	/usr/bin/env perl

I don't know if Mongoose would choke on this or not.

For a system wide installed package, it just seems like a crazy idea to
package it in a way which makes it depend on the contents of users'
$HOME/bin and such. What kind of packaging is that? I mean, package git
depends on package perl, but then leave the meaning of "perl" at the
users' discretion and mercy...

Michael