Mandrel, by design, is heavy handed in its expectations when you invoke its bootstrap machinery.
However, there are cases where it's nice if you don't have that heavy-handedness, and could instead just tell it where the project root lives.
So let's impose an environment variable: MANDREL_ROOT.
If given, then bootstrapping should automatically treat that as the root.
In so doing, it should process a Mandrel.py file if one exists in the specified root.
If no such file exists, that should not cause an error; the default search path and defautl logging behavior should all work fine.