Back in 1998/1999 Gordon Matzigkeit posted a .tar.gz "source distribution" package to the guile developers. As I recall it, this archive unpacked one or more files into the guile source code directory as well as its own subdirectory. Jim Blandy and/or Mikael Djurfeldt ripped him a new asshole for it. Does anyone on these lists still have copies of those e-mails and can they confirm this?
I personally treat with the utmost suspicion any and everything that I know Matzigkeit to have had any involvement in. This includes the autoconf/automake/libtool 'system' (including libltdl) and GRUB. Whether these tools are actually poisoned or not, their basic design is fundamentally flawed. I have already pointed out that distributing 50,000 lines of unaudited shell script is silly. This was in the 'original post' http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-08/msg00064.html There I explained that the proper solution to this autoconf problem is a special-purpose logic programming language for which people can write interpreters in any particular concrete programing language they choose. This would make the autoconf scripts auditable, and would have the significant advantage of being a usable language, which the m4/shell script hack is most certainly not. Ian
