apachectl restart and configtest

[Matthew Hodgson <ma...@mxtelecom.com>]

Hi all,

Is there a reason why apachectl no longer asserts a successful 
configtest before trying to restarting or gracefully-restarting a 
running server?  This was the behaviour back in the days of 1.3, and 
avoided many a disaster where a running server was accidentally killed 
by a broken config.  Confusingly, the documentation still claims this 
behaviour to be the case (grep 
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/stopping.html for "syntax check"). 
Nowadays (as of 2.2.x, at least), the httpd still kills the existing 
server on -k restart or graceful - even if its internal configtest fails.

It seems the original behaviour got killed off in 
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/httpd/httpd/trunk/support/apachectl.in?r1=94653&r2=95307 
back in 2002.  Is there any chance it can be reinstated?  Someone filed 
a bug back in April of this year for this at 
https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=45103 - and I've just 
posted a trivial patch against trunk there which provides the required 
functionality.

thanks,

Matthew.

-- 
Matthew Hodgson <ma...@mxtelecom.com>
Media & Systems Project Manager
Tel: +44 (0) 845 666 7778
http://www.mxtelecom.com