Folks, Recently there have been several occasions where folks complained about one thing or another in the documentation, in particular when not using the "official" documentation via the web. The NTP maintainers and I have a very strict security policy for the NTP products maintained at U Delaware. In effect, there is an ironclad moat surrounding U Delaware and the official products can be extracted only directly or via links at www.ntp.org.
In fact, all snapshots, releases, bugzilla, repositories, NTP home page and NTP project site physically reside at U Delaware. Only the documents maintained by the NTP Support Project are physically resident elsewhere at ISC. The intent is that, if you get something from U Delaware or ISC, it is authentic, official and neither modified nor infested with trojan horses. Folks should understand that, like all things in Internet social culture, things are always changing in one way or another. This applies to the sources and documentation included in each distribution. The documentation included in a particular distribution applies only to that distribution and may be different in minor ways from another distribution. Over the last several months there have been a raft of minor changes that correct minor problem leapsecond handling, secure group interoperability, orphan handling, pool features, rate management and intrusion defense. As a consequence, the doucmentation pages are being revised and improved on an almost continuous basis. Understand that the up-to-minute revision is on the web at www.ntp.org, so that may differ in small part from whatever distribution is in use. That was easy, now the hard part. The docuemntation and indeed the distributions themselves have been cloned in very many places, sometimes from rather old distributions. In quite a few cases somebody scarfs a current snapshot and wonders why some obscure option no longer works. The usual answer is to go look in the snapshot documentation, as the old option was probably broken and no longer needed. Now the ugly part. It's hard enough to deal with clones of old html pages, but some folks insist on man pages that are not in the official documentation that leaves U Delaware. The reasons for this are many, including the loss of web typography, diagrams and content. However, some folks use tools to convert html format to man format, even if that loses content. I have no quarrel with that as long as it is not claimed to be official and a disclaimer is added to that effect. To see how far the practice goes, I googled for "ntp-keygen man" and got 623 hits(!). A casual check suggests that most of them are for reformated html pages, some really old, some incomplete and some modified with errors. Users of systems like Linux that may extensively clone and convert pages from older releases may not apply to later releases and especially snapshots. Dave _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
