Comment 21 for bug 1257082

Thanks Jorge.

The way I imagined a fix going that might also be acceptable to Debian would be to treat NTPDATE_USE_NTP_CONF as no if ntp.conf doesn't exist, even if it says yes. Would this work for you?

Then I imagine addition of something like (untested):

if [ ! -f /etc/ntp.conf ]; then
    NTPDATE_USE_NTP_CONF=no
fi

and then no other changes. I think this would cause the DHCP setting to be used in our failure case, and it shouldn't cause unexpected an behaviour change since it doesn't make sense to request to use ntp.conf if it doesn't exist.

How does this sound to you? I'm not saying it's definitely the right way. I'm just not sure, so I'd like to propose it as an alternative.

What I think we're missing is a list of use cases, and without that I don't think it's possible to definitely state the right thing to do. I'm just trying to think of the most unobtrusive fix that would be acceptable to all and that minimises the risk of breaking some unknown use case.

Debian did say that they'd consider patches, so I think we should definitely first try to get their review (if that doesn't take too long) to avoid sending Ubuntu down a path that diverges from Debian.