I know I'm going to regret this, but:

In order to try to bring some order to this argument, and to stop the
vitriolic pieces of mail I'm getting, there are certain approaches we can take
in the package:

1. have an automatic check at compilation time:
can someone please tell me a command we can use in the pkg Makefile
which would determine (a) if smtp is running, or is acceptable in the
environment in which the package is being compiled, or (b) if sendmail
is running, or is acceptable in the environment in which it's being
compiled.  Then we can check, at compile time, which value to use in the
--with-mta=MTA argument to the configure script. The problem with this
approach is the binary packages, which would contain whatever MTA
support was in use on the build machine.

2. Use an environment variable:
set NMH_MTA_SUPPORT to "smtp" or "sendmail". i.e. in the package
Makefile, have

.ifdef NMH_MTA_SUPPORT
USE_MTA=	--with-mta=${NMH_MTA_SUPPORT}
.endif

The downside of this is it's yet another environment variable, and the
binary package problems.

3. Modify nmh to decide on which MTA to use at run-time, and compile in
support for all 3 types - smtp, sendmail and mmdf (my favourite, for
obvious reasons).

4. Use a different Makefile target, like the ones in ispell:

build-sendmail:

and

build-smtp:

but we're still stuck with the binary package problems.


All flames will get ignored, as will all mail sent in upper case only.