Refclocks and formatting

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> > If you mean changes to Mode 6, I'm not sure enough that shipping both hex
> > and text would fix anything to we want to do it.  How do we know old code
> > wouldn't barf on the following text?  Naive implementations in scripting
> > languages would do that. 
> 
> If you look at the old code up a level from the detailed chunk that sends 
> each field, you find that there is logic to scramble the order and send bogus 
> extra fields.  The intention was to make sure client code didn't do the 
> simple things that would break when fields are added.
> 
> So I think that old code will keep working as long as we keep sending the old 
> fields without changing them.  Or at least any somewhat sane code.  I don't 
> think we have to worry about the rest.

Ah, I think I misunderstood your proposal.  You're suggesting adding *new*
response components that have unpacked strings in them.  That makes sense.
I thought you were suggesting something else.  I'll add this to the list
of potential work items I'm putting together.

> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> >> Do we need to start tracking what we will support and/or develop
> >> a policy for when we drop support for a slot?
> 
> > I've been obsessive about documenting visible changes; see docs/ntpsec.txt
> > for them all.  There have not been many such things, and only one change in
> > Mode 6. There's one context in which it ships a driver name rather than a
> > number now. 
> 
> What I was trying to suggest was a list of the fields and which ones came 
> from ntp classic (call it version 0.0) and which ones we added and which 
> version we added them in and which fields they replace and/or have been 
> replaced by and/or some policy about how long we support each version.
> 
> I'm assuming that we can add things to test them without a lot of discussion, 
> but maybe we should think twice before we ship an actual released version 
> that has them since that commits us to support for a long time.

docs/mode6.txt

See "Compatibility Notes".  It's a start. anyway - no policy there.
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		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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