GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2013 Network Time Foundation

Improve ./scripts directory in NTP distribution

by Oliver Kindernay for Network Time Foundation

NTP distribution contains ./scripts/ directory along with ntp daemon and client software. This directory stores small scripts that proved useful when managing, monitoring or developing ntp suite. Quick search reveals that this directory contains approximately 50 scripts written in perl, shell and awk. Some of these scripts are outdated and broken or using deprecated tools. The goals of the project are to review the whole ./scripts/ directory, fix broken scripts where it makes sense, improve existing scripts by improving perl codebase using modern perl practices (mainly usage of strict pragma), adding new features and standardizing command line arguments. The output of the project will also be documentation for each script. I will be also dealing with writing tag translators between multiple documentation formats (texi, mdoc, man, .info and html) which ntp uses for documentation. Another goal of the project is to establish a testing framework for test automation on various platforms for scripts directory.