build failure with xemacs

I am having build failure when there is an xemacs installed on the
target machine:

[...]
Making all in etc
make[4]: Entering directory '/var/tmp/portage/net-mail/mailutils-3.4-r2/work/mailutils-3.4/mh/etc'
sed "s,BINDIR,/usr/bin/mu-mh,g;s,MHLIBDIR,/usr/share/mailutils/mh,g" mailutils-mh.eli > mailutils-mh.el
if test 'xemacs' != no; then \
  am__dir=. am__subdir_includes=''; \
  case mailutils-mh.elc in */*) \
    am__dir=`echo 'mailutils-mh.elc' | sed 's,/[^/]*$,,'`; \
    am__subdir_includes="-L $am__dir -L ./$am__dir"; \
  esac; \
  test -d "$am__dir" || /bin/mkdir -p "$am__dir" || exit 1; \
  xemacs --batch \
      \
    $am__subdir_includes -L . -L . \
    --eval '(setq byte-compile-dest-file-function (lambda (_) "mailutils-mh.elc"))' \
    -f batch-byte-compile 'mailutils-mh.el'; \
else :; fi


xemacs exiting.
/var/tmp/portage/net-mail/mailutils-3.4-r2/work/mailutils-3.4/mh/etc is a directorymake[4]: *** [Makefile:982: mailutils-mh.elc] Error 255
make[4]: Leaving directory '/var/tmp/portage/net-mail/mailutils-3.4-r2/work/mailutils-3.4/mh/etc'
make[3]: *** [Makefile:1641: all-recursive] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory '/var/tmp/portage/net-mail/mailutils-3.4-r2/work/mailutils-3.4/mh'
make[2]: *** [Makefile:1274: all] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory '/var/tmp/portage/net-mail/mailutils-3.4-r2/work/mailutils-3.4/mh'
make[1]: *** [Makefile:1173: all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/var/tmp/portage/net-mail/mailutils-3.4-r2/work/mailutils-3.4'
make: *** [Makefile:1058: all] Error 2


Not sure why we are looking at emacs and lisp (MH utilities?) but during
configure I have:

checking for emacs... no
checking for xemacs... xemacs
checking where .elc files should go... ${datadir}/emacs/site-lisp


exporting EMACS="no" bufore build is a work around but dont look right.

Thanks for looking into it.
-- 
Eray