Question about PERL_PATH

[Ian Abbott <abbotti@mev.co.uk>]

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:

/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.

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk>        )=-
-=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898   FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587         )=-