Re: Stepping the clock during boot

[John Hasler <jhasler@debian.org>]

Petter Reinholdtsen writes:
> Yes, such change need to be done very carefully and in stages, to
> avoid dependency loops.  See #542602 for a discussion on the ntp order
> relative to $syslog.

After some research I'm tending to think that many (if not most) of the
scripts that require $time, shouldn't (or at least should only require
hwclockfirst).  I also don't see that we still need two hwclock scripts.
Then ntp, chrony, and hwclock could provide $time and only those
packages that really need exact time should require it.  If the clock
gets stepped at bootup that fact will be quite obvious in the logs so
$syslog should be able live with the rare stepping.

I think I'll have chrony require hwclockfirst and add "X-Start-Before"s
for packages such as dovecot that stepping might break (so if you know
of such a package tell me).

-- 
John Hasler