On Dec 07, 2014, at 01:23 PM, Abhilash Raj wrote:

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.

Exactly so. It turns out that during development, it's pretty useful for the default layout to be 'dev' and for the 'dev' layout to put the var directory in the current working directory. I fully expect that system packagers would create an /etc/mailman.cfg that sets the default layout to something else, e.g. fhs on Linux systems.

Andrew, I think this is the source of the confusion, i.e. the fact that 'dev' is the default layout.

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.

Agreed. I would love to see some better organization to the documentation too. This would be a great opportunity for someone to contribute. It's pretty easy to learn reStructuredText and Sphinx.

Cheers, -Barry