svn commit: r289421 - in head/etc: . mtree ntp

[Ian Lepore]

On Wed, 2015-12-30 at 04:50 -0800, Colin Percival wrote:
> On 10/16/15 07:04, Cy Schubert wrote:
> >   Add default leap-seconds file. This should help ntp networks get
> > the
> >   leap second date correct
> >   
> > Added:
> >   head/etc/ntp/
> >   head/etc/ntp/Makefile   (contents, props changed)
> >   head/etc/ntp/leap-seconds   (contents, props changed)
> 
> So... is someone going to be keeping this file up to date?  We seem
> to have
> the same information in contrib/tzdata/leapseconds (which is being
> kept up
> to date -- thank you edwin and delphij!) but having this file in
> /etc/ntp/
> being out of date is making ntpd refuse to start.
> 

I vaguely remember warning that something like this was likely to
happen.  Turning on leapfile processing by default without an already
-in-place mechanism to keep the file up to date was a bad idea.  There
was some mumbling about a mechanism, but nobody wrote any code.

Even if the mechanism existed, I think defaulting to using the leapfile
is wrong.  It's a thing that needs care and feeding or it causes
problems, and thus it's a thing that should only be enabled by admins
who know about the care and feeding aspect (an automatic fetch
mechanism doesn't help much if there are firewalls blocking the fetch,
for example).

-- Ian