On Mon, 27 May 2002, Joshua Slive wrote: > > On Mon, 27 May 2002, Sascha Schumann wrote: > > > > -0.9. Whoever said we were deprecating them? I thought the plan was that > > > apachectl would continue to accept 'start|stop|restart' and would pass > > > them as 'httpd -k $ARGV' to Apache. That is what apachectl does > > > currently. Yes, you *could* say apachectl -k start with the new code and > > > it would work (I see no problem with that), but where in there are we > > > deprecating the old way? It sounds like just a convenience that -k works, > > > not that it's the new preferred method. Getting rid of 'apachectl start' > > > and friends seems pointless to me, and it will irritate countless admins > > > to change it after so many years for no reason. > > Part of the point of the refactoring of apachectl was to get rid of two > major problems: > > - Having two different sets of arguments for httpd and apachectl is > confusing and difficult to document
You shouldn't be giving all sorts of random options to apachectl all the time. > > - How do you pass additional command line arguments through apachectl? > What will "apachectl -f /etc/httpd.conf start -D ReverseProxy" do? > I believe the answer depends on the order of the arguments, which > is truly nasty. Erm, the point of a startup script is to give you a way to start a program without having to remember a whole bunch of random command line parameters every time. That is why apachectl was setup to let you set whatever command line arguments, etc. you need in the script so you only have to run the startup script, avoiding massive confusion and errors when you don't quite specify the exact parameters on the command line. It seems that the thing named "apachectl" has become something very very different from what it was created to be. The need to set certain environment variables before running httpd, and the need for a wrapper script that provides standard command line options to start/stop/etc processes, allows you to pass in the proper command line options, etc. are two quite different things.
