systemd 216 may break NTP switch in gnome-control-center



Hi distributors,

After upgrading to systemd 216, you may find that the NTP switch in
gnome-control-center no longer behaves properly. This is because
timedated now only controls systemd-timesyncd and is incompatible with
other NTP implementations like ntpd or chronyd. The recommended fix is
to remove ntpd/chronyd as they're no longer required, but you could also
build systemd without timedated and provide an alternative
implementation of its D-Bus interface, or use a patch for timedated like
the one provided at [1]. See the discussions following [1] for
discussion on why you may or may not want to replace ntpd/chronyd with
systemd-timesyncd and why timedated will no longer support these NTP
implementations.

Here is the relevant information from the systemd release notes [2]:

"timedated no longer reads NTP implementation unit names from
/usr/lib/systemd/ntp-units.d/*.list. Alternative NTP
implementations should add a

Conflicts=systemd-timesyncd.service

to their unit files to take over and replace systemd's NTP
default functionality."

Note that adding the required Conflicts will prevent timedated from
managing NTP.

Also note that GNOME's code has not changed (besides that our NTP switch
is now insensitive rather than completely broken if timedated is not
managing NTP), and this issue is unrelated to the imminent release of
GNOME 3.14, though it is likely to affect only distros shipping GNOME
3.14.

And lastly, please consider how you will handle upgrades! It may be
quite tricky to handle upgrades properly without either breaking the NTP
switch or automatically removing ntpd/chronyd.

Thanks,

Michael

[1]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-August/022367.html
[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS

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