On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 08:41:03AM +0100, Harald Dunkel wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I learned some time ago that daemons restart or reload their config
> file, when they receive a HUP. sendmail, sshd and tons of others do.
> 
> smtpd doesn't. :-(
> 

there are multiple reasons behind that:

- smtpd can be killed/restarted right away without having to do cleanups
  and given that other MTA are supposed to retry transfers if connection
  drops, the complexity of dealing with reloading when you could just do
  a plain restart was not worth it. reload would be nice, it's not a big
  deal as far as i'm concerned and not high on my todo.

- until a few releases ago, configuration was read by the parent process
  and children would inherit it through fork() so reloading was not even
  an option, but eric@ solved this.

- until 6.4 the handling of configuration did not allow reloading due to
  how it works, an issue solved with the new grammar and config format.

- until 6.4 parsing of the configuration was not properly isolated and a
  lot of side-effects could happen in the daemon when the parser was ran
  so it was not possible to parse a new configuration without breaking a
  currently running one, an issue that I solved.


with recent developments we moved from a situation where reloading could
not be done to a situation where someone willing to spend a few hours on
that issue could probably solve it.

i'll continue moving towards that direction but reloading not being very
important in my mind it might take time, if someone wanted to work on it
i'd help with getting started though ;-)


-- 
Gilles Chehade                                                 @poolpOrg

https://www.poolp.org                 tip me: https://paypal.me/poolpOrg

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