Ntpd config file support

[Ralf Friedl]

Hi Laszlo

First, please either write your message below the quotes, or omit the 
quotes. Especially don't quote parts that are not relevant to your message.

Laszlo Papp wrote:
> At least three people expressed that it is about convenience, a useful
> one.
Well, all of them didn't provide a convincing argument. And most others 
on this list wonder why you make such a big deal about something that 
can be solved with a few lines in a shell script. If you want a 
configuration file only for the time servers, this script will give you 
compatibility to the ntp.org config file:
#!/bin/sh
NTPD_OPTIONS="..."
exec busybox ntpd $NTPD_OPTIONS $(sed -nre 's/^server *(.*)$/-p 
\1/g'/etc/ntp.conf )

> Anyway, please comment on the init script that I posted earlier when
> you get around to it, as well as the corresponding config file..
I'm not Harald, but I will comment on it anyway.
Short version:
It's a very nice script. Use it. Be very happy with it.

Long version:
I guess it fits into your distibution, but it's useless for most others. 
That was one of the points Harald made, you want things specific to your 
distibution in Busybox, where they don't belong. You could place it 
somewhere in the contrib directory, but it would probably be a waste of 
space and bandwidth.
Most distributions come with a template for such a script, and it 
shouldn't take more than a few minutes to adapt such a template.
You use start-stop-daemon. Why do you think everybody would even have 
the program, or want to use it?
Your script has a reaload case, where you send SIGHUP. What should ntpd 
do on SIGHUP? Reload the config file? You said that reloading the config 
is not necessary when it was about code size, so why send SIGHUP?
Finally, the export in the configuration file is not necessary.

In one email in this thread someone suggested to make the configuration 
hardcoded as the compile time configuration. I just hope that was meant 
as a joke.

> > Usually scripts in/etc/init.d use /etc/default/* as config values
> > (some distros, even using them as main config files). The scripts that
> > Laszlo posted fit that pattern.
> Not quite; actually "/etc/default" is more like a Debian, et al,
> pattern. OpenWrt will use something. Yocto uses something else, etc.
> And for what it is worth, buildroot is also strange with
> "/etc/default/ntpd" without any busybox indication.
Which again shows that distributions are different, so which distibution 
style should Busybox pick? It is up to the distribution to provide the 
right information to the program.

> I would ask this question from myself if I were you: what do I gain or
> lose with such a feature added or rejected? ...
That is a good question if maximizing the number of users is the top 
priority.

Also someone suggested that devices today have GHz CPUs and at least 
512MB RAM. Well, maybe they are not the target audience of busybox. 
There are also devices with 16MB RAM and 4MB flash.

> I do not follow. The busybox user is the distro and maintainer in this
> case, really. The end user is not necessarily even aware of busybox,
> I would really appreciate more respect here towards end users.
> The end users have raised their opinion how they
> would like to see your software behaving.
I hope you realize that you are contradicting yourself here, within a 
few lines of a single email.