What IS the right NTP behaviour ?

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 09:05:27AM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> It is no surprise that people have different expectations of how
> timekeeping should behave, and I'm trying to figure out
> what Do What I Want is.
> 
> I think I have identified three variations of "DWIW", which I have
> named "eCommerce", "SCADA" and "Workstation"

I think there is a class of network devices similar to SCADA, where the
correct system time is a bonus, highly desirable, but still a bonus.
Many entry class switches or routers often come without battery
buffered RTC. For those, startup should not wait for NTP to become ready
at all. Time drifts beyond a certain limit are better served by just
stepping. The primary intention here is to have logfiles that can be
correlated.

Joerg