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

[Erik Trulsson]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 11:53:23AM +0100, Kirill Ponomarew wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 11:47:32AM +0100, Holger Kipp wrote:
> > > I'm fine with this plan for 6-CURRENT.  For 5-STABLE, it's a major
> > > user-visible change, and that is something that we promised to avoid
> > > with stable branches.
> > 
> > It violates POLA on 5-STABLE, and it will violate POLA on 6-CURRENT,
> > especially as most perl programmers assume /usr/bin/perl to be the
> > correct path. 
> 
> If it's linux tradition to put perl in this path, perl programmers
> should assume another path on FreeBSD, so it isn't an argument for
> the proposed change.

It is not a *Linux* tradition. It is a *Perl* tradition which predates both
Linux and FreeBSD.
Most Perl documentation, going back over a decade, has used
#!/usr/bin/perl  in example scripts and strongly suggested that system
administrators should put Perl there.

I would say that there are probably more Perl scripts out there that
refer to "#!/usr/bin/perl" than all other variants put together.

> 
> > We had enough good arguments against this change already, so imho
> > the correct thing to do is do just what Kris asked for: remove the
> > _dangling_ symlinks.

-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se