I don't understand Hal's emergency fix.

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> The up to date code crashed when I poked at a running server with ntpq -p.  
> The intercepts for both sendpkt and recvpkt were unconditionally printing 
> stuff before they had checked the mode.  In the recvpkt case, it was using 
> unitialized info...
> 
> My patch was for the the latter problem.  It had nothing to do with stepping 
> the clock.  You had already fixed that one.
> 
> I may not have analyzed the problem correctly, but my hack to ntp_intercept 
> did fix the problems I was having and without it, even if it didn't crash, 
> there was crap getting printed to stdout/stderr if you ran ntpd in -n mode so 
> you could watch normal logging on the terminal or run from gdb.  (In normal 
> daemon mode, stdout and stderr go to /dev/null so crap printout doesn't 
> bother anybody.)

OK.  I understand now.

If the ntpq -p buf recurs, notify me and have a few hours' patience, I'm
in the process of making a change that should prevent the problem.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>