[pkg-ntp-maintainers] Bug#785665: Bug#785665: ntp: support for atom driver not included

[Richard Laager]

On 01/10/2018 11:03 PM, Daniel M. Weeks wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Nov 2017 05:00:50 -0600 Richard Laager wrote:
>> I recommend *against* enabling ATOM support.

I retract the above statement. Sorry for the noise.

I must have been thinking of a different driver. Driver 22 (REFID "PPS")
in ntpd/refclock_atom.c is useful in certain scenarios. I used it myself
with a Symmetricom clock using the WWVB driver, and continue to use
those drivers with NTPsec. So now that I'm thinking of the right driver,
I now agree that it is desirable to have built.

Driver 22 was working out-of-the-box for me, but that was on an Ubuntu
(Xenial) system and not Debian. Ubuntu had enabled PPS support with a
Build-Depends on pps-tools (plus some documentation updates). I see that
the ntp package in Debian currently has a Build-Depends on pps-tools (on
linux-any). Ubuntu didn't need --enable-ATOM for it to get built.

>> It is much better to use SHM to talk to gpsd. Here are a whole bunch of
>> details:
>> http://www.catb.org/gpsd/gpsd-time-service-howto.html
>>
> There is nothing in that document that discourages ATOM.

The link was to show the alternative approach (SHM talking to gpsd). I
still recommend this approach instead of driver 22 for Raspberry Pi GPS
Stratum 1 systems.

-- 
Richard