Steak and sizzle

[Eric S. Raymond]

Achim Gratz <Stromeko at nexgo.de>:
> Eric S. Raymond writes:
> > I think ntpmon might be it.  "Look! Real-time status updates! Color!
> > Animation!" OK, animation only in the crudest possible sense, but
> > human beings undeniably do respond to this sort of thing.
> 
> Hmm.  What exactly does it buy me over running 'watch -n 5 ntpq …' with
> the rest of the command line suitably crafted, maybe running that in a
> few tmux panes?

/me looks up tmux.

Maybe none, maybe a lot.  Depends on how much value can be added by clever
postprocessing of readvars dumps, and whether color highlighting can be
made to have any actual functional value, and what we put in the lower panel.

>                  I'd think that getting this ntpmon thing to do
> _something_ is easily done, but there's a long, deep rabbithole down to
> where it can do everything everybody would want from it.

Of course that's true. I don't think that rabbithole will be a bad place
to be after 1.0.  N people we get involved in trying to tweak the UI is
N more early adopters.

>                                                        If ntpd grew a
> way to hand me the data I'm interested in in some easily parseable
> format it'd probably be much more useful than an ntpmon that does
> almost, but not quite what I want.

Thar way might already exist. Have you looked at readvar dump? 
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>