This appears to be a deliberate design decision by upstream. Pekwm, in both the version Debian currently ships (0.1.18) and the latest upstream (0.4.4), creates a default ~/.pekwm/start file that is not executable contains only comments. The comments in this file include instructions for making it executable when adding commands to it.
While this is an extra step that has to be performed by users when editing the file, the default file with no startup commands does not need to be executed, and upstream may have felt it was safer not to execute a script the user has not explicitly asked to have executed. While this may be different from the approaches other projects take with their dotfiles, I don't personally think it is an area where Debian needs to override upstream's design. Regards, Timothy N. Gaskell
