(I'm the currently least inactive maintainer of the Debian package.)
On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 10:40:49PM +0200, Fil wrote:
The problem was that she had configured the list to be in Spanish, but it kept sending welcome messages in English. I finally traced it to the Debian installation,
When installing the mailman package, you got asked which languages you want that site to support. You didn't include Spanish in the list. Use "dpkg-reconfigure mailman" to change the list. All languages supported by a list on the site are forced on, meaning if you turn them off, they are turned back on in your back.
which has weird symlinks: /var/lib/mailman/templates -> /etc/mailman
Templates can be changed by the administrator and are thus considered as configuration files and are thus in /etc/, as per Debian policy (and Linux FHS). This guarantees that a package upgrade won't override changes the administrator may have made.
whereas /usr/share/mailman/ contains all the templates (including es/, which she linked into /etc/mailman/ and solved the problem)
That linking may or may not confuse the maintainer scripts of the package, I'm not sure. If you want to play it safe, have your user remove that link and use "dpkg-reconfigure mailman".
-- Lionel