Comment 1 for bug 1035033

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.