[ntp:hackers] Leap second support in versions prior to 4.2.6

Brian Utterback brian.utterback at oracle.com
Sat Jun 2 13:40:11 UTC 2012


As you might guess, questions about the leap second have been ramping 
up. I found page on the support wiki ( 
http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/ConfiguringNTP ) that says 
"6.14.2. NTP Versions before 4.2.6: Pre-4.2.6 versions of ntpd evaluates 
the leap second file only if the autokey feature has been enabled." 
However, my testing with ntp-dev-4.2.5p172 and ntp-dev-4.2.5p200 show 
that this statement is false. Both of these versions will read the leap 
file if configured via the "leapfile" keyword.

I tried to look to see what versions actually do and do not support the 
leapfile without autokey, but unfortunately I was stymied by the rather 
abysmal source browser that bitkeeper uses. Perhaps I am just missing 
something obvious about how to browse historical releases with the 
browser, but it seems to me to be just about the worst browser I have 
used in this regard.

Which leads me to my next question, is there any reason that we should 
continue to use bitkeeper? When we adopted it, it seemed to be pretty 
snazzy, but it seems to be getting fairly long in the tooth. Subversion, 
Mercurial and Git all seem to be better systems these days. Is there 
some feature in bitkeeper that I am missing that makes it a compelling 
choice for us?

Brian Utterback


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