Joey Hess wrote:
I'm unsure which is the better appoach. Installing ntpdate kind of assumes it's right for everyone; I know some people, especially some people with NTP servers, don't like running ntpdate for various reasons.
If somebody needs a very accurate time, then he can uninstall ntpdate, or say 'no' in expert mode.
From my experience most servers in pool.ntp.org are within 10 milliseconds to UTC. In very seldom und unlucky cases you can get a server 6 seconds apart, as I watched last week.
I think that it's possible for ntpdate to hang the boot process for atleast one dns timeout if networking is broken.
That's the disadvantage of all these growing network (and DNS) dependencies.
On the other hand a udeb is more work, bloats d-i a bit more, and doesn't put a perminent clock setting mechanism in place.
I suggest to make ntpdate default, with a choice to say 'no' or 'chrony', and a choice between 'pool.ntp.org', and 'ntp.other.domain|IP' (e.g. for users behind firewalls).
Helmut Wollmersdorfer