Comment 1 for bug 1278359

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

I recently dealt with this area of ntpdate's operation.

> On systems that have a hardware clock this is not nessesary, causeing unnessesary traffic and load on ntp servers.

Can you quantify this, please? I believe this functionality was added on that basis that network interfaces are brought up only infrequently.

I don't think it is appropriate for Ubuntu to differ from Debian on the behaviour here. Please can you seek the opinion of the Debian ntp maintainers in this area and petition for a change there instead? Ubuntu will then sync or merge any changes made in Debian.

See this Debian bug in a related area: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=731352

As this bug describes behaviour that is by design, and I believe that your "unnecessary traffic and load" presents no significant impact to a majority of Ubuntu users, I'm marking this bug as Importance: Low. I don't think this bug will make any progress in Ubuntu without consensus from Debian ntp maintainers.