Config file tracing [Was: Random Filter Syntax observations...]

[Barrie Slaymaker <ba...@slaysys.com>]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 05:43:53PM -0700, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
> 
> Correct - therefore things must be straightforward, predictable, and explicable.

Having the ability to log each change to the filter chain would shortcut
a lot of help requests.

For incremental directives like the filter directives and even Options,
having a per-request tracing control (ConfigTrace On?
ConfigTraceLevel?) would go a long way towards allowing the confused or
puzzled admin untangle exactly what's being configures with a given
request.

It's not so important for simple "last one wins" directives, but for the
growing number of incremental directives (including third party modules,
like AxKit (which is very filter-based with a lot of custom directives
and dir_config merging code), which has a wide number of these), this
would help.

Perhaps adding a AP_DECLARE_HOOK(void,log_dir_config,(void*)) hook that
individual modules could hook to dump their dir_config contents would
suffice. The hook would be called RUN_ALL after each merge if
ConfigTrace On.  Just dreaming, I guess, since I don't have the tuits to
do a patch right now, but it would be loverly to have some kind of
tracing.

- Barrie