[Mailman-Developers] Mailman keeps creating "var" directories

[Abhilash Raj]

Hi Andrew,

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 2:38 AM, Andrew Stuart <
andrew.stuart at supercoders.com.au> wrote:

> Hi Abhilash,
>
> I very much like the capability of mailman to create its own “var”
> directory structure - most open source systems require me to spend hours
> with strace trying to work out what directories and permission an
> application needs in what location - I’m heartily sick of having my time
> wasted like that so this is very refreshing functionality.
>
> On the other hand it’s very confusing when a misconfiguration in the
> mailman.cfg results in a “var” directory being created in the current
> directory **which then gets picked up and used as the configuration**, so
> correcting your configuration in /etc/mailman.cfg then leads to a new
> problem, which is that your /etc/mailman.cfg is no longer being used *at
> all*.
>

Its not like your configuration at /etc/mailman.cfg is not used at all, its
like mailman since cannot read your settings uses its own default ones. Is
that not clean and sane enough?
And coming to your problem, since mailman is still in development the
default layout is `dev` which helps developers as `var` directory is stored
right in front of them. Once it is
packaged and released for production you can expect some default whose
behavior is different, and there are already many options that I mentioned
before.

>
> I love the creation of the var directories by mailman but it feels like a
> bit of a hand grenade with a short fuse. Whilst I was setting up my
> configuration I ended up with var directories all over the file system,
> without any understanding of why they were there.  A trap for Mailman
> newbies.
>

That may be because of the lack of explicit documentation for production. I
hope once that comes up it will be clearer for newbies and also for others
as well.

>
> Perhaps it’s worth considering making creation of the “var” directory
> structure could be the result of an explicit option rather than a default
> action.
>
> thanks
>

thanks,
Abhilash Raj