Drew, I can only respond to two of your questions (intelligently):
First, how do I return valuable information if there's a config error?
For example, if my config has the directive "MyFile conf/foo.txt" and the file doesn't exist, how can I report this when I run httpd -t?
If the error can be detected during a directive-handler, simply returning a non-NULL string will output the error string to STDERR and halt the startup process. If the error detection happens later during the server process, you will have to take different actions, but you should use a function like "ap_log_rerror(...)" to output the error description to the server's error log (what you do beyond that is up to you... the module programmer). Second, the documentation (er, at least http_config.h) suggest using
r->per_dir_config or s->module_config for the conf vector (first arg). I can only get things to work if I pass cmd->server->module_config. Is this the same as s->module_config? Is this a coding blunder?
To explicitly answer your question, they are the same thing, only with an intermediate variable set to the "server* s". Look at this page (at the very bottom): http://modules.apache.org/doc/API.html#servconf The example function creates its own "server* s" as a pointer to the server (pointer) in the cmd_parms struct. I believe this step was skipped over by your documentation page. Hope this helps, Dave
