Re: Bug#352610: Please create a udeb for ntpdate
* Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> [2006-08-23 01:14]:
> > RFC 868 (http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=868) says that the
> > rdate protocol delivers time as a 32-bit binary integer in units of
> > seconds since midnight on January first 1900 GMT (time 1 is 12:00:01
> > am on 1 January 1900 GMT).
>
> > The rdate command prints time in the prevailing timezone (as
> > specified by the TZ environment variable, to to print the date and
> > time in UTC, do "TZ=UTC rdate -p").
>
> > There is no option for the rdate command to print anything but a
> > formated date/time. This means that the output will have to be
> > parsed back into a binary integer before you do the calculations
> > needed to deduce the time zone. This is, of course, possible. But
> > shell script wouldn't be my language of choice for doing it.
> > Regardless of the language, getting the fiddlly bits just right (leap
> > years leap seconds) just right is tricky business. It's best to use
> > a pre-existing library to do the hard part.
>
> > Do you have access to perl or python at the time you want to do
> > this? Do you have access to the date/time libraries for either of
> > those languages?
>
> Nope.
>
> > Would it be better to write a simple, one-purpose, C program to do what
> > you want?
>
> Yes, C is the implementation language of choice here. I think the ideal
> solution would be to add an "output offset" feature to whatever rdate client
> is used in d-i.
waldi, do you know if that would be acceptable for busybox's rdate.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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