How does Pi get its time?

Sys V init is far from elegant (name ordered scripts ugh!) and somewhat overengineered (run levels and all those links ugh!) so I can understand the desire to replace it - but there was BSD init easily available which is like Sys V init without the ugh! Then again I am sure there are some who miss having everything in /etc/rc.

I have a slightly different theory to "It's new! Therefore it must be better!" - I think it's more about separating Linux the OS family from Unix the OS family - remember Gnu's NOT Unix.

No, the uninstall has not been an issue. The advantages are many, but briefly:

- able to accept a PPS time source (e.g. GPS)

- accepts multiple servers including "pool"

- acts as a time server for other clients

- simple setup

- easy to monitor (locally and remotely)

- having the same configuration and monitoring on Linux and Windows

You forgot:-

- nothing to do with Lennart Poettering

As if you raised a bug report on timesyncd suddenly returning an extra

---druck

Hint: For services that require the correct clock (after initial syncing with the internet) add the following to the /etc/systemd/system/your.service definition of your servicve:

That reminds me of a sales pep rally that I wasn't allowed to duck out of. The bigwigs were going on about "product differentiation" - which I interpreted as: "Make it different, even it it means screwing it up."

Hence disastrously obscure and degraded user interfaces :(

Isn't the reason that Micro$oft OSes use '' for file/folder separator is that unix used '/' and MS had to be different?

No.

CP/M which DOS was based on used a backslash, and IIRC that was derived from a floppy disk system that was part of an intel 8080 development platform

"Gary Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1974,as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with a Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy disk controller"

AFAICR the A:\ format was part of that platform.

Unix was developed not from microcomputer hardware but on minicomputers and its ancestors are radically different...

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 20:16:05 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson snipped-for-privacy@franjam.org.uk>

declaimed the following:

Not really... I believe early versions of MS-DOS may have predated subdirectories and used "/" to flag command line options. When subdirectories were added, they needed a different character for path delimiter. UNIX conventions weren't that well known back then unless one were in academia -- big iron was likely using IBM OS/360 or variants, middle stuff was PDP-11 migrating to VAX-11/VMS, and desktop systems were CP/M, TRS-DOS (variants), Apple<whatever> (all of which were single directory level per drive -- closest TRS-DOS 6 got to sub-directories was a "partitioned data set" utility which derived from the OS scheme of storing short commands into a single file to save floppy space; the PDS utility basically made a file into a library and provided syntax to identify members of the PDS individually.

The actual internals don't care which is used, and "/" actually works better for code with some literals for paths. "C:/directory/test" is C: directory test but "C:\directory\test" gets parsed in most code as C: directory<tab>test

VMS also uses "/" for command line options... But there is no chance of confusing it with anything else as paths look like

device:[directory.sub]test

No!

CP/M did not have a heirachial directory system. The CP/M filesystem was single level with user IDs and drives being the only separations, user IDs were not visible and a little strange by modern standards - there were only 15 of them with 0 being everyone.

CP/M filenames were like A:THING.COM - no slashes in any direction.

The official reason seems to have been lost in time, but we can infer it from some history

So, when Microsoft wrote MSDOS v2, which supported a directory structure, they obviously could not use the forward-slash as a directory component separator, as it was already firmly established (in code, no less) as the sentinel for command flags. They had to pick a different separator for directory components, and they settled on the backslash (in the command processor), and /either/ the backslash /or/ the forwardslash in the API.

Microsoft operating systems, to this day, will accept either backslash or forwardslash in paths passed to the file functions API.

PS: The source code for PCDOS/MSDOS v1.1 /and/ MSDOS 2.0 is available from The Computer History Museum at

v2-0

From the MSDOS v2.0 source code README.TXT: ...

1. Documentation. Features of 2.0 are documented on this disk.

The user manual contains some significant errors. Most of these are due to last minute changes to achieve a greater degree of compatibility with IBM's implementation of MS-DOS (PC DOS). This includes the use of "\" instead of "/" as the path separator, and "/" instead of "-" as the switch character. For transporting of batch files across machines, Microsoft encourages the use of "\" and "/" respectively in the U.S. market. (See DOSPATCH.TXT for how you can overide this. The user guide explains how the end-user can override this in CONFIG.SYS). Both the printer echo keys and insert mode keys have now been made to toggle. The default prompt (this may also be changed by the user with the PROMPT command) has been changed from "A:" to "A>". We apologize for any inconveniences these changes may have caused your technical publications staff.

...

Sincerely yours,

Chris Larson MS-DOS Product Marketing Manager

It's not the same thing.

NTPD runs all the time and can poll time servers every few minutes and keep itself very accurate. It can also act as an NTP server that other software can use.

TIMESYNCD just polls an NTP server once and shuts down. It's typically run only a few times a day by a cron job.

Slackware still uses /etc/rc.d and after using Slackware for years as a server OS, I certainly would miss it. When I first started poking around Raspbian, it took some adjusting to accomplish even some minor changes.

YES!

It has been so long

You must be older than dirt. :) I have been retired for over 15 years and started using Slackware circa 1990 for our first web server/mail server at work. Before that I played with Xenix a bit as a learning tool. As near as I can remember neither one ever used /etc/rc. What flavor of Unix or Linux were you using?

I'm still working - coming up on 63 with retirement set to 70, but I've been in the computer business since the late 1970s when I got involved in the Newbrain project as a vac job - a couple of years later and I was Chief (only) Hardware Engineer at Torch and back around the BBC computer project.

A bit later than that I think - 92 or 93 would be about the earliest for Slackware - I put SLS on a box in 1992 then replaced it with FreeBSD.

I used XENIX III and V as well as a number of early Unix systems, the most primitive of which was an Idris system that lacked hardware memory management and was based on a unix old enough to pre-date fsck - the combination was not good for a machine used by C developers and we all got good with icheck, ncheck and a disc patching tool as well as very familiar with the filesystem internals.

Before that I mainly worked with CP/M and MP/M and avoided MS/PC-DOS and Windows as much as possible.

sounds like early Berkeley to me.