The underpinnings of that argument are flawed. You're accepting the premise that there were relatively "normal" build processes "back in the day" and "abnormal" ones now. This is not in fact the truth of the matter at all.
M. Bernstein's own build system was redo. But he never actually published a redo tool. Other people did that. There are traces of a precursor to redo in one of his packages. But even they were not the actual build system for it as released to the public. Again, it was other people who took them and fleshed them out into a working build system. The slashpackage system, similarly, only existed in (another) one of his packages. And again, it was other people who extended it to other packages.
The reality is that the build system evident in djbsort is not a sudden inconsistency. The various packages over the years are all inconsistent. One can in fact derive from them a timeline both of development of ways of building packages and evolution of the various "DJB libraries". But they are all snapshots of these processes at different points. They aren't a coherent single system across multiple packages. I, Paul Jarc, and others had to make that part. (-:
So do not deduce that there's been a change. Deduce, rather, that build systems have always been a lower priority and an unfinished loose end. As such, this is nothing to do with the announcement at Sage Days 6 and the like, nor to do with people "screwing around" as you put it. Indeed, the clear motivations of redo expressed in M. Bernstein's own writings on the subject have nothing to do with either copyright or preventing modifications to packages, and everything to do with problems of make and indeed autotools. Observe the motivations of "honest" dependencies from the build instruction files themselves, from the command-line tools and their options, and from things like the absence of header files.
M. Bernstein's own build system was redo. But he never actually published a redo tool. Other people did that. There are traces of a precursor to redo in one of his packages. But even they were not the actual build system for it as released to the public. Again, it was other people who took them and fleshed them out into a working build system. The slashpackage system, similarly, only existed in (another) one of his packages. And again, it was other people who extended it to other packages.
* http://jdebp.info./FGA/introduction-to-redo.html
* http://jdebp.info./FGA/slashpackage.html
* http://jdebp.info./Softwares/djbwares/
The reality is that the build system evident in djbsort is not a sudden inconsistency. The various packages over the years are all inconsistent. One can in fact derive from them a timeline both of development of ways of building packages and evolution of the various "DJB libraries". But they are all snapshots of these processes at different points. They aren't a coherent single system across multiple packages. I, Paul Jarc, and others had to make that part. (-:
So do not deduce that there's been a change. Deduce, rather, that build systems have always been a lower priority and an unfinished loose end. As such, this is nothing to do with the announcement at Sage Days 6 and the like, nor to do with people "screwing around" as you put it. Indeed, the clear motivations of redo expressed in M. Bernstein's own writings on the subject have nothing to do with either copyright or preventing modifications to packages, and everything to do with problems of make and indeed autotools. Observe the motivations of "honest" dependencies from the build instruction files themselves, from the command-line tools and their options, and from things like the absence of header files.