Proposal

Just like we parse the configuration file before the WAL (#7399, #7322), we should parse rules files before loading the WAL.

I have just had a pretty nasty incident where this problem, combined with a systemd unit that would Restart=on-failure, lead to a total disk exhaustion after systemd infinitely retried to reload a config broken before the weekend (well, two days before, but it seems no one noticed before the weekend).

The gory details of that incident are in:

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40939

I have also filed this bug against the Debian package to fix the systemd unit:

https://bugs.debian.org/1022724