Denis Barbier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 10:45:41AM +0200, Frank Küster wrote: >> > From: Denis Barbier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> > Subject: Re: Bug#360790: eperl: Gobbles shebang line >> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 20:29:47 +0200 >> >> It would be nice if you Cc'ed this directly to the submitter, > > Huh? A message to -done is forwarded to the bug submitter, > as described in [...] > It worked for a long time, no idea if this behavior has changed lately.
It still works, it's just a matter of taste. I sort those messages into a "debbugs-boring" folder and don't frequently read them, and I never had a problem with that because people always sent the closing mails to the submitter themselves. I guess that's because in most mail clients, one would have to remove the submitter manually from the To or Cc. Never mind. > For the record, I highly dislike those packages built with eperl, they > are unreadable for outsiders. I think this isn't true for the teTeX packages. We don't use much fancy Perl code, mainly variable substitutions with sensible variable names. And it makes the script source much shorter, and most importantly, it makes them much less buggy and error prone: We have to synchronize many actions between the different maintainer scripts, and even between those from different source packages (tex-common, tetex-bin, tetex-base), and this could only be done manually - with all the error proneness it brings - without eperl. >> Please, if this is *really* the intended behavior, > > Yes it is, ePerl is primarily designed as a web scripting language, > and in this context it is important to not have garbage at the > beginning of files. You can see for instance that php has the > exact same behavior. You mean, in this context it is important that a script can have a usable shebang line that does *not* point to eperl, but this line is removed once the script is processed by eperl? That sounds strange to me, but I'm curious. Can you give me a pointer to where this is used? >> then it needs to be documented *clearly*. However, I think that the >> behavior should be changed, and the shebang line only removed if it >> points to eperl. > > Honestly I am still not sure if this is worth the trouble, your use > case is very special and I am reluctant to make things unnecessarily > complicated. > There is a simple solution to your specific problem, you can add > <::> at the very beginning of your file. That's fine, but it must be documented somewhere. Really, it's completely counterintuitive (at least if your intuition isn't biased by regular web scripting ;-)), and it does *not* at all follow from the current description. Oh, and it's not actually so fine. Editors usually detect the file type by looking at the first line(s), and in Emacs (probably vi too) I automatically get shell syntax highlighting if there's a /bin/sh shebang line. If the shebang line is only the second one, and the first is <::>, it won't trigger that autodetection. Isn't that a severe drawback for web scripting purposes, too? Usually I offer to write a patch if I suggest documentation enhancements, but in this case I doubt this will help, since the use cases where this bug is actually a feature should probably be mentioned, too, or at least thought of when writing the text - but I can't imagine one. Thank you, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
