Re: How does gnus talk to sendmail

[gdt@work.lexort.com]

  /usr/lib/sendmail has been the traditional place for sendmail for a
  long time, so it's a reasonable default.  The project that's trying
  to standardize paths for applications in linux (sorry, it's late
  here and I've just finished 6 hours in the car so the name escapes
  me) wants to restrict /.*lib to libraries and /.*bin for apps (I'm
  probably oversimplifying and thereby offending someone but what the
  heck I don't think I'm being judgmental about it).

NetBSD's hier(7) documents similar rules for /{usr/,}{lib,bin}.

I think /usr/lib/sendmail was the traditional place in 2.8BSD and
4.0BSD.  In BSD land, it's been in /usr/sbin/sendmail for quite some
time, I think since 4.3BSD or 4.4BSD in the early 90s at the latest.
In NetBSD, there's /usr/sbin/sendmail which is really mailwrapper(1)
to choose among available MTAs, and sendmail itself is in
/usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail.  But, /usr/sbin/sendmail is what emacs
should be calling.

I haven't had any problems with emacs calling sendmail incorrectly as
long as I can remember.

{I realize you probably know most of this, but for the benefit of the
person having trouble:}

Reading the sources (21.4, in lisp/mail/sendmail.el), I see some
amusing workarounds for SunOS 4.  Bit, I also see /usr/lib/sendmail as
a default if sendmail-program is not defined.
paths.el sets sendmail program by looking for sendmail in various
places:

(defconst sendmail-program
  (cond
    ((file-exists-p "/usr/sbin/sendmail") "/usr/sbin/sendmail")
    ((file-exists-p "/usr/lib/sendmail") "/usr/lib/sendmail")
    ((file-exists-p "/usr/ucblib/sendmail") "/usr/ucblib/sendmail")
    (t "fakemail"))			;In ../etc, to interface to /bin/mail.
  "Program used to send messages.")

So all looks well, on both modern and old systems.