Comment 58 for bug 1832182

First, sorry if I'm in the slightly wrong issue here. The most recent comment before mine fits our situation perfectly and wasn't old, so I think it's an acceptable place for this discussion.

> So we have a regression when `apache2ctl graceful` is called directly, which I think it's still a common thing

I agreed.

'common thing' is more than true: apachectl resp. apache2ctl were here before init systems started to support 'reload', and propably before Debian's 'service' wrapper around several supported init systems.

Hence
1. long-term admins are almost hard-wired to call apache2ctl directly
2. many many scripts do so
3. many many how-to guides, readmes, ..., do so too

IMO the 'restart' and 'graceful' branch in apache2ctl should be split up.

But I haven't investiagtes why graceful -> restart might make sense in the first place. At all.