The mailman script which is used to start/stop/restart the mailman daemon invokes mailmanctl with the -s argument when starting the service. This argument purportedly is for stale lock clean up. One consequence of passing this arg during a service start is that mailmanctl bypasses the lockfile check. My understanding of the lockfile is to prevent multiple instances of the daemon to be run. But by passing the -s argument if someone does a "mailman start" more than once then there will be multiple instances of mailmanctl and its child qrunner processes running on the system rather than just one mailmanctl and its child qrunners. Issuing a "stop" only terminates the most recent mailmanctl and leaves the other mailman daemons effectively orphaned from a service point of view, these service instances can only be removed by killing their pid.

If the -s is not passed as part the "start" invocation mailmanctl will enforce having only a single daemon. This is what I would expect to be the desired behavior. So my question is why is -s the "default" in 2.1? Should it be removed?

John