On 2016-11-04 15:03 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ralf Treinen <trei...@free.fr> writes:
>
>> in the Colis project (which aims at analyzing maintainer scripts) we
>> found 39 maintainer scripts in stable which do not start on #!. The
>> list is attached. Policy 6.1 says about maintainer scripts:
>
>> if they are scripts (which is recommended), they must start with the
>> usual #! convention.
>
>> Any objection against filing bugs against the offending packages? Since
>> policy says "must", severity=serious would be in order, right?
>
> In this case, I don't think one can justify severity higher than normal.
> Not all Policy "must" violations are serious. I think serious should be
> reserved for things that cause user-visible breakage, and this only
> affects the rather unusual use case of running the maintainer script
> manually.
In dpkg versions before 1.16.1 those bad maintainer scripts would
actually fail to run, but as a consequence of the fix for bug #622094[1]
dpkg is more tolerant now. Unfortunately this has caused quite a few of
these broken scripts to creep into the distribution.
Cheers,
Sven
1. https://bugs.debian.org/622094
