[pkg-ntp-maintainers] Bug#808864: ntp-wait takes very long

[Michael Stroucken]

Package: ntp
Version: 1:4.2.6.p5+dfsg-2+deb7u4
Severity: minor

ntp-wait waits until the status line contains "leap_none", but
sometimes this took 40 minutes to reach. The application here
is an embedded system on hardware that may not have a battery clock,
or an unreliable one. A runtime of less than a minute would be good.

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=864193 also talks about
this issue. The solution there was to interpret the status code
to see when sync was reached.

I don't know if their code can be taken as is, but the documentation site
referenced there
https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/decode.html#sys
seems to indicate that the sync_ field when set to sync_unspec indicates
"not yet synchronized", while other messages indicate time has
synchronized. Perhaps Debian's ntp-wait should be adjusted.

Greetings,
Michael.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.9
  APT prefers oldstable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-486
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages ntp depends on:
ii  adduser      3.113+nmu3
ii  dpkg         1.16.16
ii  libc6        2.13-38+deb7u8
ii  libcap2      1:2.22-1.2
ii  libedit2     2.11-20080614-5
ii  libopts25    1:5.12-0.1
ii  libssl1.0.0  1.0.1e-2+deb7u17
ii  lsb-base     4.1+Debian8+deb7u1
ii  netbase      5.0

Versions of packages ntp recommends:
ii  perl  5.14.2-21+deb7u2

Versions of packages ntp suggests:
pn  ntp-doc  <none>

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/ntp.conf changed [not included]

-- no debconf information