[HEADS UP] perl symlinks in /usr/bin will be gone

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, Oliver Lehmann wrote:

> Anton Berezin wrote:
> 
> > In practical terms this will mean a one-time sweep of your scripts in
> > order to convert them, in a typical case, from #! /usr/bin/perl to
> > #! /usr/local/bin/perl.
> 
> Wouldn't that break most of the 3rd party scripts out in the world?

The following URL:

http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=%23%21%2Fusr%2Fbin%2Fperl&q2=%23%21%2Fusr%2Fbin%2Fenv+perl&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us

Suggests firmly that the answer to that question is yes.  What worries me
particularly about the proposed change is that it requires administrators
to touch the scripts of their user's files as part of an upgrade -- this
is not a good situation for an ISP to be put in.  That or to immediately
re-add the symlink on the basis that the practical reality is that
(despite some limited documentation to the contrary), that's the way
everyone runs perl.  I have the suspicion that while removing this symlink
may encourage programming cleanliness, it's going to shoot a lot of feet
unnecessarily.  Also, since env isn't a built-in, it means exec runs twice
for every perl script, not once...

Robert N M Watson