Bug#947936: chrony: Does (still) not start properly on boot on buster

[Santiago Vila]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 08:41:19PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:

> I guess at this point it is best to ask chrony, ntp, openntpd, ntpsec
> and virtualbox [1] to drop the Conflicts= line again.
> Maybe we should even do that for buster via a stable upload?
> 
> Thoughts?

Hi. I definitely think this should be fixed in stable, in whatever way
it's considered best for stable.

The last thing a system admin would expect from Debian stable is that
the clock is off by several minutes in a system where a time-keeping
package like ntp or chrony is present. This was completely unexpected
for me. (In fact, I would have reported this as serious but I prefer
to concentrate on finding a good fix).

Regarding the proper fix: Anything which makes chrony and ntp work
again (without surprises) would do. I agree that the less intrusive
the change, the better.

In the Debian 10 instances at GCE where I found this I just did this:

systemctl disable systemd-timesyncd

Would it make sense to ship systemd-timesyncd disabled by default in
buster and add a README to enable it only if the user really decides
to enable it? (Maybe also documenting this in the release notes).

That would be the most simple solution for stable that I can think,
as it would reduce the number of packages to change to just one.

Thanks.