Question about PERL_PATH

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.