[ntp:questions] Attn Linux distributors - pse include PPS

Rob nomail at example.com
Sat Apr 26 07:33:35 UTC 2014


Harlan Stenn <stenn at ntp.org> wrote:
> William Unruh writes:
>> On 2014-04-25, Paul <tik-tok at bodosom.net> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 4:36 PM, William Unruh <unruh at invalid.ca> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Why shoul dit ship with no refclocks? ... DO you have the same opinion for
>> >> serial
>> >> port or parallel ports, or network drivers?
>> >
>> >
>> >  (Ignoring your mischaracterization of what I said and the strawman
>> > arguments) because a negligible number of time consumers have a refclock.
>> > Back in the day I recall a distro that had ntp-client and ntp-server
>> > packages  -- so I'm sure I'm not the first person to propose it.
>> 
>> More recent ntpd combine server and client in one program. 
>> Not sure when that was. 
>
> It's been the case for at least 20 years' time.
>
> This is something that may be different in the upcoming rewrite.

I think it is not a wrong guess that there are more systems that use
ntp only over the network than there are systems which have local refclocks
as well.

But that is not the point.  The point is that the program is compiled
with a fixed set of refclocks that is unneccessarily limited because
the environment it was compiled in was not complete.  This would be less
of a problem when the refclocks were loadable modules or were running
in separate processes on the same machine.  Then one could compile a
single refclock module or program and add it to an existing system.

But until that has been implemented, we could at least try to have the
distributors build a complete ntpd by default.  Today there is no reason
(on the PC platform at least) to squeeze out a few KB of the executable
size by omitting a couple of refclocks.  My custom built ntpd on Ubuntu
is just 55216 bytes larger than the default one.
Those bytes probably don't even occupy memory.
But it took me 2 hours to learn how to build it and actually do that, a
waste of time IMHO.  And it is now in risk of being overwritten by a
security update.



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