This is about the 66,00 lines of code that are in the confige script and are not routinely audited and are typically run as root.
In
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-09/msg00098.htmlNeil Jerram proclaims:
> People are absolutely NOT encouraged to run ./configure and
> make as
root. In around 20 years of Guile development, I don't
> recall ever
doing or encouraging that.
address@hidden:~/build/guile-2.0.11$ ls -ld /usr/local
drwxr-xr-x 19 ian ian 4096 2014-08-11 23:39 /usr/local
What is the default setting of --prefix?
It doesn't matter that ./configure is not run as root, that script writes the makefiles that are run as root to install the package.
This is GNU policy, but that doesn't in itself mean it isn't as really, really stupid thing to do.
Ian