Stale NTP software included in FreeBSD (RELEASE/STABLE/CURRENT)

[Chris Nehren]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 14:07:46 +0200, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 04:10:24PM +1000, John Marshall wrote:
> > ntp 4.2.4 is the version that shipped in all of the above releases and
> > is also included in 10-STABLE and 11-CURRENT at present.  ntp 4.2.4 was
> > superseded by the ntp 4.2.6 release on 12-Dec-2009.  Is there any
> > interest in getting a supported version of the ntp software into the
> > upcoming 10.1 release?  I would have thought that the latest patch
> > release of the stable ntp version (4.2.6p5 24-DEC-2011) would be
> > appropriate?  I know that the ntp folks are working on releasing 4.2.8
> > but it isn't quite there yet.
> 
> One of the thing that makes updating ntp complicated it that is now
> depends on bison extension which our old yacc (as of freebsd 8 and 9),
> newer byacc (freebsd 10.0) does not support
> FreeBSD 10.1 and FreeBSD current have a newer byacc version that does
> support the said extension

This is the sort of complexity that supports an argument for
removing ntp from base altogether.  Why does it need to be there?
"Because it's always been there" is not good enough.  Why do we
still include the bloated, demonstrably insecure and dangerous
ntpd when openntpd is BSD-friendly and a lot simpler?  I can see
the argument for needing to keep accurate time, but that is not a
reason to include all of ntpd, is it?

-- 
Chris Nehren
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