System Config Tools Cleanup Project - tools to eliminate/replace

[Nils Philippsen]

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 23:53 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > - AFAIK, none of the tools in the DEs deal with NTP right now (do they
> > at least honor it being used and then block setting the system clock?),
> > so I'm not inclined to drop it
> 
> KDE actually does.
> 
> That said, it doesn't detect an NTP setup configured with
> system-config-date, it shows NTP as not in use.

I haven't looked at the tool/applet in question, but to me this seems
more problematic than not caring about NTP at all. I guess KDE stores
the setting whether NTP is used or not in some KDE configuration place?
It's probably a bit more work to operate with the actual OS setting
which might be implemented in very different ways on the various OSs
where KDE is deployed (Linux distros, other Unixes, ...), but if you
want I can try to help out with that so that it can be done properly on
the OSs where we know how to do it. I imagine it like this piece of
pseudo code:

if system is LSB compliant
        use LSB functions to check for status/start/stop NTP
        (/usr/lib/lsb/{install,remove}_initd, calling /etc/init.d
        scripts directly)
else if system has /sbin/chkconfig, /sbin/service
        use chkconfig, service to check for status/start/stop NTP
else if (yet another way to do it)
        (do it yet another way)
else if ...
        ...
else
        don't bother

Naturally, this would have to take the various names of NTP init scripts
into account (e.g. "ntp" vs. "ntpd"). It also shouldn't matter much if
the above decisions are made during build- or runtime. The various OS
teams would then be responsible to keep their part of this up to date.

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase 
Red Hat               a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils at redhat.com       nor Safety."  --  Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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