time-admin help manual should mention NTP time slewing

[Bryce Harrington]

Binary package hint: ntp

After installing and configuring ntp (and reading the time-admin help manual from the help button), I noticed the time didn't seem to change. I ended up just restarting the service and it updated appropriately.

I learned from other sources that this is because rather than change the time all at once, it does it bit by bit ("time slewing").

It would save some confusion to mention this time slewing behavior in the help documentation alongside the directions for configuring time synchronization.

[Dave Walker (dogatemycomputer)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Agreed, however the help you're mentioning is the time-admin help (NTP manpage certainly mentions slewing), so I'm reassigning to gnome-system-tools.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Thierry: do you really believe this will happen for Lucid? We need somebody to write the doc, then apply an Ubuntu-specific patch (upstream is frozen), and get it translated...

Bryce: I know this is lousy, we also have problems with the "Synchronize Now" button not always working. Feel free to provide a patch! ;-)

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Well, I'm not the one that has nominated this bug to Lucid ;)

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Given no one else seems to have complained about this, coupled with it sounding like getting the doc fix backported would be prohibitively hard, the lucid task is probably doesn't have a high enough bang for the buck to do it.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I do think the docs should be fixed for the upcoming Precise LTS.

Thanks for the invitation to produce a patch for this, but I have only a fuzzy working knowledge of how time slewing is being implemented.