>I guess I'd like to post my formal complain against Gods of NetBSD
>and their i386 1.4.2 sendmail-8.9.3 packaging. Very poorly done.

and i'm going to speak in their defense.  :)

>The above sendmail package comes with a sendmail.cf which has the
>mailertable rulesets commented out. This cost me a few days. 
>Obviously not a good first impression. 

the mailertable and supporting rules are not turned on in *any* of the
sample cf files that come with netbsd, nor are they turned on in any
of the sample cf files that come with sendmail.  they are a "feature"
that you must add to your mc file.

>You never mess with sendmail.cf rulesets, not in the last few years.
>Every
>thing should be managed from above via m4(1). Yes, in the old days, 
>that is how we did it. And I'm glad I was there to get my hand dirty
>and now I can fix this. But, the pase is simply too fast now.

the pace is fine.  the only thing that netbsd has lagged on is
building cf files with cf.m4 preloaded by m4.  they all have cf.m4
loaded explicitly in the mc files.  that has been fixed for the 1.5
release, although you can still load it again in the mc file if you
wish.  cf.m4 is smart enough to deal with that.

>The said sendmail.cf has the "mailertable" feature (along a few other
>features).
>but the line is commented out. So one uncomments that and thinks that
>this
>is it. Populate the files, makemap(1) them and that is it.
>
>No, you now have to follow the rules to see what portions have further
>been commented out. And of course the rule-id itself is there, so
>the thread hits S90 and comes right back up with no error. But no 
>translation was done because the body of S90 was commented out.

right...because the rules come with the feature that isn't turned on.
blame the sendmail people of you like, for putting them in but
commented out if you want to blamce someone.  i imagine they put them
there for people to play with who have not yet learned to use m4.
i'll be the first to admit that it took me a while to pick up that
trick.

>The other problem was that, the "Kmailertable" had a 'dbm' type,
>and makemap(1) says 'dbm' type is not supported in this version.

again...dbm is the default that is commented out.

>Further, the current sendmail.cf shows inclusion of "netbsd" as OSTYPE.
>But guess what, sendmail does not have this under its m4/cf directory.
>So now you have to understand that, that is really a bsd4.4.

hmm...i see netbsd-proto.mc included, but that's the only line i see
that says netbsd on it anywhere.  where'd you get that information?

>This reminds of Linux a few years ago....is that where you guys are...

no.  this is a far far better thing we do.

-- 
|-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----|
codewarrior@daemon.org             * "ah!  i see you have the internet
twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown)                that goes *ping*!"
andrew@crossbar.com       * "information is power -- share the wealth."