Reload of configuration with conflicting options causes immediate shutdown
I'm not sure, in the words of the GNU coders, this is a bug or a feature, but I just noticed that in the event of conflicting torrc options that a kill -HUP of the running tor PID will cause an immediate shutdown. I was basically just upping the bandwidth I was devoting to my relay, but like a fool I decided to see if adding 'UseBridges 1' would work with some obfs3 bridges that a friend of mine has set up. Immediately upon reload it dumped; that is, non-graceful shutdown.
Being as a relay lifecycle can take up to ~70 days, especially after a few misconfigurations and/or other minor issues, would it not be better for the tor network to configure this handling so that it simply refuses the conflicting option, parses correctly the new options, and falls back to the previous configuration if it's something minor like this with a warning? I had just gotten my stable flag back after somewhere between 10 & 20 days and I'm feeling bad I can't contribute more to the network again already, as I expect that this crash will make me lose that flag again.
Trac:
Username: damogets