Comment 6 for bug 936216

If httpd is configured to log to a file in a non-existing directory, it refuses
to start up, e.g.:
[Fri Sep 28 03:58:13 2007] [notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
(2)No such file or directory: httpd: could not open error log file
/etc/httpd/logs/mailman/error_log.
Unable to open logs

It's useful when restarting Apache to check if any configuration changes will
prevent the restart from being successful (and thus result in down time when the
restart command is issued). However the configuration syntax check doesn't check
if log file directories exist and so doesn't catch this problem

Other non-existing directories (for serving files out of etc) don't prevent the
entire process from starting up and so aren't such critical errors.

It would be great if either
1) the inability to create a log file did not prevent httpd from starting
2) the config test (or another test) checked for this condition (and possible
other config options that would prevent startup)