bin/mailman --help could be improved

[Stephen Turnbull]

What the "reopen" command does is not at all clear. (Is it like "reload" in an init script, rereading config files? If so, maybe "reload" would be a better name.)

Presumably the "restart" command stops *and* starts the runners.

You can assign this to me (it would be appreciated if you'd tell me what reopen does, although I guess I could read the code. :-)

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

The 'reopen' command essentially causes the master watcher to SIGHUP the runner subprocesses. Right now all this does is reopen their log files, so it's there primarily to support log rotation. It would be nice if the runners could re-read their configuration files, but I suspect that will be difficult. Also, for correctness, the master should also re-read the configuration file.

Yep, restart causes the master to SIGUSR1 all the runners. They exit, but with a status that the master recognizes as a restart, so it does. This does have the effect of reloading all the configuration files of course, but only for the runners, not for the master (though it may not matter much).

Take a look at src/mailman/bin/runner.py for details. I'll assign this to you, unmilestoned. If you want to take a crack at config file reloaded, go for it, but if not (i.e. starting and stopping might be good enough), just mark this as Invalid.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I'm going to take a strict approach to this bug, and will attempt to improve the documentation.