[Lightning] Gordon Matzigkeit's late '90s guile-devel posts

[Ian Grant]

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