On Thu, 15 Jan 1998, Greg Hudson wrote:

: > This gets my vote, as it's obviously the real problem.  It's foolish
: > to assume that any one transport will be appropriate for everyone.
: 
: So, to be correct, every Unix MUA has to be aware of every Unix MTA?
: 
: /usr/{sbin,lib}/sendmail is the standard way of sending mail under
: Unix.  /usr/bin/mail does not implement an SMTP client, and it
: shouldn't.  When vi wants to tell you about a lost mail message, it
: doesn't have to know about N different transports to do so.  So why,
: just because a package happens to be called "mh" or "nmh", is it
: suddenly appropriate to know about a million different ways of
: injecting a message into SMTP-land?

And who's to say that the mail system used is SMTP at all?  UUCP is still
used a lot out there in the real world.  It _is_ reasonable to assume that
/usr/{lib,sbin}/sendmail injects a mail into the local and/or wide and/or
global area network's mail system.  Nmh is _not_ the only MUA to assume
that; it's pretty durn universal.

As the default injector is /usr/{lib,sbin}/sendmail, I'd like to offer the
possibility, posted here earlier, of moving the sendmail binary to
/usr/libexec and allowing /usr/sbin/sendmail to be a symlink to the
appropriate mailer.  That way not so many people will get their whities in a
bunch, and we should all be a lot happier.

(There was also the "/usr/bin/sendmail wrapper script" whoch could be made
to be configured from /etc, but is that worth it?)

=====
===== Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com) =====
== "There's a myth that there is a scarcity of justice to go around, so
== that if we extend justice to 'those people,' it will somehow erode the
== quality of justice everyone else receives."  -- Maria Price