On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 09:58:24AM -0300, Dererk wrote: > > I consider that the description is both, relatively generic and straight > forward to a function or service, which in my opinion, in this case is > the main goal.
The problem I have with alot of virtual packages is what you can expect from such a virtual package. Some of them are very clear in what you can expect, but others are not. It currently just says "anything that serves as a time daemon". I can for instance interpret that as a daemon that just tells you what the current time is, like the daytime or time service. It's part of most inetd implementation, but ussually not enabled by default. It will not change the local clock, just tell you the current time. Someone else might want to have something that can keep it's clock more or less at the correct time, but doesn't need it to be a daemon. There are several programs that can do that like adjtimex, hwclock, chrony and probably some others that compensate for the drift of your clock by having 2 measurements and setting the kernel kernel to compensate for that. Others might need something to have all computers in their network to agree on the time. For instance Kerberos needs them to agree on the time, but it doesn't care that it's the correct time. This can be done by ntp by setting 1 server to redistribute it's local clock and let all others sync to that, but requires manual configuration. Depending on ntp does not garantee you anything. The computer might not be in a network, or it might be but might not have access to external ntp servers. On a related note we currently have this in the init script info section: # Provides: ntp So packages that now depends on ntp | time-daemon and there is something else that provides time-daemon installed, and the package has a Required-Start: ntp in the init script it probably broken unless that other package also provides ntp. And ntp currently does not sync the clock at start, it ussually takes about 3 minutes for it to set the time for the first time. There is a program ntp-wait you could use to wait for that, but you probably don't want to wait that long before starting your service. If you have that installed on your laptop, and you currently don't have network connectivity you probably also don't want to wait until that times out before you can log in. Kurt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
