NTP users are strongly urged to take immediate action to ensure that their NTP daemons are not susceptible to being used in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Please also take this opportunity to defeat denial-of-service attacks by implementing Ingress and Egress filtering through BCP38.

ntp-4.2.8p15 was released on 23 June 2020. It addresses 1 medium-severity security issue in ntpd, and provides 13 non-security bugfixes over 4.2.8p13.

Please see the NTP Security Notice for vulnerability and mitigation details.

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Are you using Autokey in production? If so, please contact Harlan - he's got some questions for you.

Source Code Management

Related Topics: WhyBitKeeper

History

Eventually, we started using CVS, and that worked well for a while.

After a while, the limitations of CVS started driving Harlan crazy, and since he is the driver of the beast, he looked for a replacment. After about 2 more YEARS of study and looking, he chose BitKeeper and has been very happy with it ever since.

In early 2005, it was announced that BitMover would be stopping its free use license for BitKeeper.

While we are looking to continue on using the commercial version of BitKeeper, people have been asking about evaluating a replacement for BitKeeper.

Requirements

• The SCM must be invisible to Dave Mills
• its use must not require any signature from anybody at UDel for its use there
• it must support file and directory renames
• it must support tracking of file/directory permission attribute changes
• it should support checkins for work-in-progress
• it must support the functionality we have with the existing triggers, described in the BitKeeper/triggers/trigger.cfg file of any ntp-dev or ntp-stable repo, which execute the following scripts:
  • BitKeeper/triggers/notify (used for debugging)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/paranoid (used for security)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/commitlogs (commit log email)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/2mirrors (updates repository mirrors)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/send (changeset email)
• it must easily support ntp-stable and ntp-dev repositories, and pulling changesets from ntp-stable to ntp-dev, and should support pulling changesets from ntp-dev to ntp-stable
• it must support integration areas
• it must be robust, reliable, and easy to use
• it must not be a pig
• it must have useful merge support
• it must have useful branch/LOD support
• it must have an easy/useful way to find when changes were made
• it must have a useful web interface

There are probably more, but this is the list off the top of my head. Oh, please also see MaintainerIssues#How_to_work_on_a_bug for how I like to handle dealing with patches and things.

SCM Matrix

Comparisons and References

• Comparision between BitKeeper and other SCM packages - bitkeeper.com
• Version Control System Comparison - better-scm.berlios.de
• Comments on OSS/FS SCM Systems
• Kernel Traffic #210 For 23 Mar 2003
• Linus on the BK withdrawal

Comments

If you would prefer to add your comment below instead of editing the table above, please do so. You can also email your comments to webmaster@ntp.org .

• One of the major gripes with P4 amoungst the FreeBSD userbase is the utter lack of decent support for anonymous r/o checkouts. In this respect, switching to perforce would make "public" access to ntp's development source much worse than it is now. -- TWikiGuest - 06 Dec 2005 15:27:22

• I updated the SCM table above. I think if you look at the current post-CVS SCM landscape, there are really only 4 open source choices: SVN, git, Mercurial, and Bazaar. Using an "obscure" SCM like SVK or BitKeeper will not encourage participation. The fact that the project uses non-free BitKeeper could prevent a lot of contributors; I have never inspected the history or tried to contribute because of that very fact. The "free" Bitkeeper is useless, I don't have a BitKeeper license, and I don't want to learn yet another SCM. My suggestion would be to use Mercurial, as it is almost as easy to use as Bazaar, but has better support for Windows and better GUI tools. -- RyanMalayter - 13 Apr 2009

• Ryan, thanks for updating the table and I appreciate the input. What is stopping you from creating a diff patch and submitting that? I'm not convinced we'd see a noticeable uptick in contributors if we switched away from bk, and even if we did:
  • it would be a huge amount of work for me (remember, we have spent a Lot of effort on the release engineering side of things, which is a heavy user of the SCM).
  • there is a chance there would be at least some problems along the way and we'd have to either try a different SCM or abort the effort and continue with bk.
  • I would also bet that if we chose 'A' then there would be a vocal group that said "Why did you pick 'A' when 'B' is better?"
  • I sometimes have to use other SCMs - they are all pretty similar and all have their own quirks. I don't buy the argument that learning bk is too much effort. And having used both svn and git, I still like bk better than either.
  • bk remains my favorite SCM tool and I am one of the heaviest users of this tool for NTP.
  • the BitMover folks have been Very Good to us, for a very long time. They continue to be Very Good to us. We benefit from using bk and I am happy (even eager) to spread this news around - I hope BitMover befits from our (published) use of bk and from my telling folks how happy I am with bk. I am not fickle; I choose my relationships carefully and consciously. I'm not about to flush my/NTP's relationship with BitMover just because an open-source alternative is almost as good (or even "as good", and I haven't seen this yet).
    -- HarlanStenn - 06 Mar 2011

-- HarlanStenn - 09 May 2005