[ntp:questions] Fwd: [ntp:hackers] 4.4 development

Philip Prindeville philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com
Sun Aug 26 00:51:33 UTC 2018


Casting a wider net…


> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Philip Prindeville <philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com>
> Subject: [ntp:hackers] 4.4 development
> Date: August 15, 2018 at 2:45:07 PM MDT
> To: hackers at lists.ntp.org
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> With 4.2.8p12 being released, we can start thinking about what we want in the next major release.
> 
> I’m doing some work that will become more public later, but for now I can reveal some of the changes that support that work or that I’d like to see done otherwise just to pull us into the twenty-tens (which are almost over anyway):
> 
> * get rid of all the #ifdef cruft supporting different platforms and different forms of event-driven/asynchronous I/O in ntpd/ntp_io.c and just let libevent do the dispatching and machine-specific parts for us;
> 
> * deprecate support for platforms which aren’t being used and may be of dubious value (i.e. Windows XP & Vista, VMS, OSF4 & 5, SCO, Solaris2.5, SunOS3, IRIX, Unicos [SMP], HP-UX 9, NextStep, …) — some of these aren’t even from this millennium.  More more than 1 are PTSD triggers.
> 
> * Pivot to OpenSSL 1.1.0x which will have TLS 1.3 support and various other updates, as well as dropping the compatibility library which supports 1.0.n;
> 
> * Pivot to Libevent 2.1.5 or later (currently we ship win 2.1.5 in-tree and I don’t like in-tree stuff… it’s a rabbit hole… how many projects include a broken version of libtool in-tree?);
> 
> * Pivot to autoconf-2.68 and automake-1.15 or later;
> 
> * Update the autotools files accordingly (i.e. use PKG_CHECK_MODULES() for version testing and properly detecting the presence of pkgcfg [.pc] files);
> 
> * Various security cleanup, like being smarter about buffers and not using sprintf() and other insecure functions;
> 
> * Isolating the Bitkeeper checks into specific scripts invoked by the Makefiles, rather than being *in* the Makefiles, so that this can all be more SCM agnostic;
> 
> * General cleanup of the autotools files like places where AC_SUBST() and AC_DEFINE() got interchanged or otherwise confused;
> 
> * Fix all bootstrap warnings so that we’re CB-friendly (can you say, “Travis”?);
> 
> * Do another round of refactoring to see what [common] code can be moved into libraries;
> 
> * Drop Visual Studio 2005 support because anyone still using that should be taken behind the wood shed along with a dull axe;
> 
> * Add more test coverage;
> 
> * Get rid of concurrent pthread’s or child processes for things like DNS resolution, or reporting back to systemd that we’ve launched and sync’d successfully;
> 
> * Agree on a Gold Standard for development (i.e. one of the more up-to-date OSes that tracks all of the other projects we’ll be leveraging);
> 
> As well as support whatever protocol development happens.
> 
> I thought I’d kick off this conversation.  I understand whatever I suggest someone is going to take issue with it, and that’s okay.  Bring it on.  We’ll get through this and all get to a better place.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Philip
> 
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