[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#912375: please consider specifying the full path name to wish in /usr/bin/ds9

[Sergio Gelato]

Package: saods9
Version: 7.5+repack1-2
Severity: wishlist

Some of our users have experienced breakage in Debian's /usr/bin/ds9 due to certain variable settings in their environment. Although this might be considered user error, it may be possible to alleviate this class of problem by hardening the ds9 script; please consider doing so.

Both the problems I am aware of involved a private installation of Tcl/Tk taking precedence over the system one. In one case, the user had an installation of NASA's LHEASoft, with its own libtcl8.6 and libtk8.6 on the LD_LIBRARY_PATH search path; this issue is mentioned at https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/lheasoft/issues.html and could be worked around by unsetting LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the ds9 script. In the other case, LD_LIBRARY_PATH was unset but the user had a wish executable (from an AstroConda installation) ahead of /usr/bin/wish in the search path; this could be worked around by making the script exec /usr/bin/wish explicitly.

(In both cases a contributing factor was that the LHEASoft/AstroConda installation lacked a working Tcl "xml" package, which ds9 depends on.)

I've wondered whether there might be policy reasons against the above workarounds but couldn't find any. Section 10.4 of the Debian Policy Manual is silent about fully qualifying path names (outside of the #! bang path).