Bug#689412: perl-base: Doesn't throw an error if first parameter is a directory

[Axel Beckert]

Package: perl-base
Version: 5.10.1-17squeeze3
Version: 5.14.2-13
Severity: minor

Hi,

"perl /tmp/" does nothing (that's still fine), throws no error message
and returns zero as exit code. This is non-intuitive and can cause false
negatives in testsuites (i.e. make them pass when they should fail).

Background and reasoning why calling perl that way should fail with a
non-zero exit code:

We ran into this with an autotools based Perl project using test driven
developement.

Main script:     projectname/projectname
Test template:   projectname/t/foobar.t.in
Configured test: projectname/t/foobar.t

projectname/t/foobar.t.in contains beyond others the following
Test::More test:

  ok( system('perl', "@srcdir@/projectname", '--help') == 0, 'option --help should be allowed' );

autotools replaced "@srcdir@" with ".." in this case, i.e. after running
configure, in projectname/t/foobar.t it looked like this:

  ok( system('perl', "../projectname", '--help') == 0, 'option --help should be allowed' );

Calling "./foobar.t" from the "projectname/t" directory level works as
expected, but calling "t/foobar.t" from the "projectname" directory
level did unexpectedly pass the test, too, because
"projectname/../projectname" is the project's base directory.

Our workaround is now to write the test like this:

  ok( system('perl', "@srcdir@/t/../projectname", '--help') == 0, 'option --help should be allowed' );

But this seems ugly, non-straight-forward and not obvious.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.6
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages perl-base depends on:
ii  dpkg                          1.15.8.13  Debian package management system
ii  libc6                         2.11.3-4   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib

perl-base recommends no packages.

Versions of packages perl-base suggests:
ii  perl                   5.10.1-17squeeze3 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

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