4 ms·

From what I understand of ESR's claims, much of the removed functionality is support for older platforms. Unlike NTP Classic, he asserts POSIX and C99. Appare

by scj 10y ago

From what I understand of ESR's claims, much of the removed functionality is support for older platforms. Unlike NTP Classic, he asserts POSIX and C99. Apparently, this has drastically reduced complexity/size. Of course, I haven't worked on the NTP code. But given the described circumstances, I'm willing to entertain the argument that older features now cost more to maintain than they are worth.

acqq 10y ago
Sorry, you fully missed the topic here. There was another "liberator" who did his own, "NTP (minus most of it) from the scratch" effort -- PHK, not ESR. See the posts in the thread please, specifically, the one by gpvos for the link. The problem is, none of these "liberators" actually improves NTP, and none can (by default from their goals) provide a "better" NTP but only a small subset, typically even less tested. And everybody of those gets some funding and a lot of the attention, instead of the real maintainers of the darned NTP. Doing big, widely present and very compatible and long-lived projects is hard. Very hard. And the maintainers should be helped, not blamed.
- oblio 10y ago
  As an outside observers - and ignoring the whole drama aspect of ESR - you say "very compatible". Does "very compatible" mean "wider compatibility than POSIX and C99"? If so, that's a very ambitious goal, but is it worth in this age?
  - acqq 10y ago
    It's very clear that I don't consider as positive contribution anybody not willing to commit to the support of the big project but who promotes his quasi-solution as discarding the existing feature set and the existing compatibility and then running away. If somebody complains "the source is not up to the current security standards" that doesn't mean that anything has to be discarded to work towards that goal. And if somebody wants to make the source compiling only with the most recent compilers and only for the small subset of the previous platforms he obviously has another agenda than improving the security, or actually helping the project. It's just enforcing his taste to the people who never asked for that. For my personal experience, at my previous work I was able to "just use" NTP, and I know that on these platforms I still can't use any of the alternatives. I admit I surely have another perspective than the average Linux user who doesn't really care what keeps his time in sync as long as it "looks right."
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      Sometimes dropping older platforms is a sane approach. In this case, however, I would expect even MIPS R4000 running IRIX and PPC 603 AIX boxes to still be able to keep their internal clocks in sync the same way my Xeon machines do.
      - acqq 10y ago
        Also worth considering "NTPsec has removed lots of stuff that has zero reported bugs in them, like sntp, the ntpsnmd code, and various refclocks." And reading this comment: https://lwn.net/Articles/714279/ https://lwn.net/Articles/714279/ "in general all the other NTP implementations likewise lack broad support for all the various reference clock hardware and drivers. This is why ntpd is still used so heavily as stratum 1 servers." And, additionally.. are the servers running Windows a small and obscure base?
gcp 10y ago
Unlike NTP Classic, he asserts POSIX and C99. Aka not supporting Windows.

by scj 10y ago

acqq 10y ago

Sorry, you fully missed the topic here. There was another "liberator" who did his own, "NTP (minus most of it) from the scratch" effort -- PHK, not ESR. See the posts in the thread please, specifically, the one by gpvos for the link. The problem is, none of these "liberators" actually improves NTP, and none can (by default from their goals) provide a "better" NTP but only a small subset, typically even less tested. And everybody of those gets some funding and a lot of the attention, instead of the real maintainers of the darned NTP. Doing big, widely present and very compatible and long-lived projects is hard. Very hard. And the maintainers should be helped, not blamed.

oblio 10y ago
As an outside observers - and ignoring the whole drama aspect of ESR - you say "very compatible". Does "very compatible" mean "wider compatibility than POSIX and C99"? If so, that's a very ambitious goal, but is it worth in this age?
- acqq 10y ago
  It's very clear that I don't consider as positive contribution anybody not willing to commit to the support of the big project but who promotes his quasi-solution as discarding the existing feature set and the existing compatibility and then running away. If somebody complains "the source is not up to the current security standards" that doesn't mean that anything has to be discarded to work towards that goal. And if somebody wants to make the source compiling only with the most recent compilers and only for the small subset of the previous platforms he obviously has another agenda than improving the security, or actually helping the project. It's just enforcing his taste to the people who never asked for that. For my personal experience, at my previous work I was able to "just use" NTP, and I know that on these platforms I still can't use any of the alternatives. I admit I surely have another perspective than the average Linux user who doesn't really care what keeps his time in sync as long as it "looks right."
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    Sometimes dropping older platforms is a sane approach. In this case, however, I would expect even MIPS R4000 running IRIX and PPC 603 AIX boxes to still be able to keep their internal clocks in sync the same way my Xeon machines do.
    - acqq 10y ago
      Also worth considering "NTPsec has removed lots of stuff that has zero reported bugs in them, like sntp, the ntpsnmd code, and various refclocks." And reading this comment: https://lwn.net/Articles/714279/ https://lwn.net/Articles/714279/ "in general all the other NTP implementations likewise lack broad support for all the various reference clock hardware and drivers. This is why ntpd is still used so heavily as stratum 1 servers." And, additionally.. are the servers running Windows a small and obscure base?

gcp 10y ago

Unlike NTP Classic, he asserts POSIX and C99. Aka not supporting Windows.