Ntpd config file support

Bryan Evenson bevenson at melinkcorp.com
Tue Mar 18 13:59:37 UTC 2014


All,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: busybox-bounces at busybox.net [mailto:busybox-
> bounces at busybox.net] On Behalf Of Harald Becker
> Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:53 AM
> To: Laszlo Papp
> Cc: busybox at busybox.net; Adam Tkáč
> Subject: Re: Ntpd config file support
> 
> Hi Laszlo !
> 
> >That is not much of a difficulty today. Systemd can probably do this
> >for one.
> 
> Not everybody like to use systemd ... I hate it and will NEVER use it on a
> system of mine!
> 
> >The main concern is not whether or not it is easy. It could be easy the
> >same way to put it into the source code. The problem is that people
> >keep reinventing the same in different projects.
> >That is a sign of something not going well in my opinion. I am not sure
> >what much code you are speaking of. Reading a simple config file in
> >should be the matter of few lines (in C, at least).
> 
> ... but the running daemon need to know when to read the file.
> 
> Reading info only on startup makes not much sense in your term, a script
> may read the config and put it in command line. Done, and so simple.
> 
> ... in any other case there need to be code to tell the daemon the right time
> to (re)read the config and (re)configure it's behavior, which is much more
> difficult than just a few lines of reading a file. Have you ever done this?
> 
> >It is not a good intention to keep things small just for the sake of
> >being small.
> 
> One of the primary goals of Busybox was, to have a SMALL code space for
> systems with less resources. IMO for this it's important to ask before adding
> extra code ... and it's more than just a few lines of reading a file (see above).
> 
> 
> >Currently, I believe most of the cases will be when ntpd is run as a
> >daemon and not a one-shot process. You could hard code a default value,
> >but yet, the end users would like to configure it via some easy
> >configurable means, not messing with init script internals, etc, IMHO.
> 
> Put NTP peer address in a config file, let your init script pick this file and put it
> in command line. What's wrong with this?
> Average user just needs to know how to put peer address in a file. Why do
> we need to blow up an otherwise small daemon with this config file handling
> stuff? ... just to configure a single peer name?
> 

I'm also using ntpd with a Yocto Project based system, and I had switched to using the full ntp package instead of the Busybox supplied ntpd because of configuration.  Within this build framework, I didn't see an easy way to adjust the ntpd command line or to set its configuration for the final built image.  At the same time, I can understand the resistance to adding another configuration file that needs to be maintained.

How about a set of ntpd menuconfig options to build the command line?  We could configure the default ntpd settings at build time, it wouldn't add anything to the size of the final ntpd binary.

Regards,
Bryan


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