somewhat OT: configure and mterm was Re: Vintage terminals

Yes. But it's substantially easier to verify a program than a configure script. For example, if any of the .o files making up vttest were to refer to socket() - something easily checked with nm|grep - I'd want to at least look at the code for it. That sort of verification is substantially harder to do for a configure script. I'd also point out that this is hardly distinctive to open source; running closed-source binaries involves the same trust only with a significantly lower ability to check even if you wanted to. Oh, I'm much less worried about one of the overt authors. I'm more concerned about some malicious cracker breaking into the distribution mechanism at some point and inserting something malicious that the legitimate code authors didn't intend. (I've already heard of it happening at least once and I think twice.) Speaking purely personally, this is also part of the reason I tend to roll my own so much - though that isn't much help to other people faced with the same dilemma. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B