Removing obsolete refclock drivers - speak now or forever hold your peace

[mark.atwood at ntpsec.org]

I'm planning to remove five refclock drivers from NTPsec. They support hardware that's been discontinued for 15-20 years with zero mailing list activity since 2019:

- modem (type 18) - NIST/USNO dial-up time service. NIST discontinued ACTS in 2010. 929 lines.
- oncore (type 30) - Motorola Oncore GPS. Motorola exited GPS in 2003. 4,152 lines.
- truetime (type 5) - Kinemetrics/TrueTime receivers. GOES support died in 2005. 786 lines.
- arbiter (type 11) - Arbiter 1088A/B satellite clock. 445 lines.
- zyfer (type 42) - Zyfer GPStarplus. Company gone. 301 lines.

That's 6,600 lines of code for hardware nobody can buy.

If you're actually using one of these and want it to keep working:

1. Send me a photo of your time lab. I want to see vintage timing gear in action.
2. I'll port your driver to an out-of-process daemon that feeds ntpd via the SHM interface. Same functionality, cleaner architecture, and you can hack on it without touching ntpd internals.

I'll wait one week. Silence means consensus.

Mark