Re: [gpsd-dev] Updated docs on NTP segment management

[Harlan Stenn]

"Gary E. Miller" writes:
> Harlan Stenn <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Your patch uses clock_gettime() to get the time for the tvc structure.
> 
> Eric supplies an alternate clock_gettime() for OS that do not have it, or
> that name it something else.

Where is this?  I'm not seeing it in the gpsd repo.

> Other than Windows I think the portablility fallback is now known good.

Not to the breadth of machines that NTP runs on.

I've also got a report of clock_gettime() not being present on some Mac
OSX releases.

I see gpsutils.c has a timestamp() function that will use
clock_gettime() if it's available, and gettimeofday() otherwise.

> Eric decided to remove a lot of the half-way good enough time functions
> and just go to nSec all the time for consistency.  Now gpsd only needs
> to support one universal system time function, not a bunch of them.

> It also removed a ton of time conversion, comparision and display
> functions, greatly simplifying the code, and remove a lot of odd ball
> corner case failures.
> 
> Also gspd has had a history of developers taking low resolution time and
> later using it in high resolution contexts.  Put another way, a lot
> of speccial caing to fit the exact precision needs has been problematic, so
> we have been moving to just always doing things in the most precise way.

This is all good, and it's not in the git repo I have on my machine.  My
repo says it's up to date.

And to do what you ask will require a major overhaul a short period of
time before a patch release to our -stable branch.

So at this moment I'm inclined to take the easy way out and get our code
running on lots of platforms again, knowing we can do something with a
local replacement for clock_gettime() down the road.
-- 
Harlan Stenn <address@hidden>
http://networktimefoundation.org - be a member!