When editing the config and attempting to reload it syntax errors are
often detected this is good that an error in the master config is
trapped before it effects the running daemon.

What's not so good is that these errors are recorded in paniclog
and have to be cleaned out of there else they will get mailed to people

It would be nice if the checking of
  /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp
could write its logs (particularly paniclog) to a different location
(stderr is probably sufficient)

That is hard to do. The only way to give a log_file_path that diverges
from what was set at compilation time is to set it in the
configuration file. If logging is done to report an error in the
configuration file, the log_file_path given in the configuration file
is not yet valid, causing the error message to go to paniclog, which
is exactly what we want to avoid.

To reach that behavior, it would be necessary to compile exim to
report to a different place than paniclog, which may cause other
conditions to be reported not in the paniclog.

In my opinion, this is too much a deviation from the intended upstream
behavior. Andreas may disagree.

I am going to set this bug report to wontfix if Andreas doesn't state
his disagreement by the end of September 2013.

Greetings
Marc

yeah, wontfix sounds good.

tags 706901 wontfix
thanks

Ok, taging accordingly.