Re: [Ntp] NTPv5: big picture

[Miroslav Lichvar <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 12:39:41PM -0700, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> I don’t subscribe to this line of reasoning.  It sounds a lot like getting the camel’s nose under the tent for justifying why leap information needs to be part of the protocol.  It doesn’t.  It’s an ugly vestige that should be jettisoned.

It's ugly, but we need NTPv5 to be based in reality and be useful.
The TAI-UTC offset is not always known and clocks are sometimes
synchronized in isolated networks.

> If we used strictly monotonic timestamps, and had a well understood mechanism for mapping from that to any other required format out-of-band, that would be more than adequate: it would be ideal.

Yes, that would be nice, but it's not possible if we want to support
existing use cases of NTP and be implementable on current operating
systems.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar