Re: GNU Coding Standards, automake, and the recent xz-utils backdoor

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > Now for a bit of speculation.  I speculate that a cracker was careless
  > > and failed to adjust certain details of a bogus tar ball to be fully
  > > consistent, and that `make distcheck' enabled somene to notice those
  > > errors.
  > >
  > > I don't have any real info about whether that is so.  If my
  > > speculation is mistaken, please say so.

  > I believe it is completely mistaken.  As I understand, the crocked 
  > tarballs would have passed `make distcheck` with flying colors.  The 
  > rest of your questions about it therefore have no answer.

Thanks for correcting me on that point.  However, people have proposed
changes in make disclean and may propose changes in our coding
standards.

When considering any such change, we still should consider the question:
will this actually prevent cracks, or will it rather give crackers
an additional way to check that their activities can't be detected.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)