NTP switch in gnome-control-center is broken

[Miroslav Lichvar]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2014 at 08:07:41AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-10-09 at 14:19 +0200, Kalev Lember wrote:
> > Beyond that, whether it's systemd's internal code or chronyd or
> > anything
> > else running underneath, gnome-control-center doesn't really care, As
> > long as it works well and we can use the timedate1 interface to
> > configure it. :)
> 
> Miroslav, I think if the Fedora systemd maintainers are not willing to
> change this, then I think our options are to (a) escalate to FESCo, or
> (b) drop chrony. Like Kalev says, we're completely fine with keeping
> chrony so long as it can be controlled by timedated.

After the systemd rebase in f21, there is a patch reverting the
upstream change, but it wasn't included in rawhide yet. I've asked
three of the Fedora systemd (co)maintainers if they could look into
it. Unsurprisingly, nobody seems to be interested in maintaining the
patch in rawhide indefinitely and I suspect trying to force it through
FESCo would do more harm than good.

Maybe the best option here really is an alternative timedate
implementation. I gave it a shot and here is the result:

https://github.com/mlichvar/timedatex

The controlled NTP unit is selected from the ntp-units.d directory,
similarly to what systemd-timedated did before v216. There are also
some other minor improvements.

If it passes the initial round of testing and bug fixing, I think it
will be a low maintenance package. The timedate API doesn't seem to
be changing very frequently (so far only in v198 and v209). Maybe
other distributions will find it useful and help with the maintenance.

If anyone would like to help with the testing or review, here is the
review request with an srpm package:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1165679

Thanks,

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar