Thanks a lot!

All my build chroots (more precisely, virtual machines) have openssh installed by default in addition to [base] and [base-devel], so indeed I missed that dependency.

Hi,

I don't think that shipping half broken binaries (ntpq with libedit as an optdep) is a good idea. I would do either of the 2 things:

1. If additional functionality provided by readline/libedit is necessary, link against libreadline (not libedit, since not everyone has ssh) via ./configure --with-lineeditlibs=readline and a hard dep on core/readline.
2. If none is necessary, please use ./configure --with-lineeditlibs=no which produces ntpq binary not linked to any line editing lib (even in the presence of openssh).

Thanks,
Leonid.

Optional dependencies are not "half-broken" as you seem to imply: most people never run ntpq/ntpdc, and making libedit optional to them makes sense.
However, libedit provides features beyond what readline does, which is valuable to those people who actually use the ntpq/ntpdc.

If you are unhappy with the way things are right now, I see no option but to make libedit a hard dependency.
It is only a small library and anyhow Arch always strives to build featureful software rather than slimmed-down software.

My only point was that ntp got this new dependency "by accident". So if this was a "good" accident (noone really complained about an extra lib), let's make this new dependency permanent, otherwise, disable the libedit/readline checking at compile time to make PKGBUILD more robust against a particular building environment.

Regarding readline vs libedit -- you probably know better, so I trust you on this. But IMHO a binary on which ldd/lddd complains, is broken (that's how I found out about this bugreport). Besides, ntpq/ntptrace in particular is a useful query tool (how do you know that daemon is syncing properly, or determine your stratum?).

Making libedit a hard depdendency is probably the best because this way is simpler... I was also going to suggest splitting ntp in ntpd and ntp-tools, but I guess this is too Debian'ish :)

Yes, the libedit story is a happy accident.

Although we both find ntpq/ntptrace useful, not everybody running an NTP daemon bothers checking that it runs properly, hence why I made the dependency optional. Anyway, the dependency is small enough that it makes no difference, so I'll make it a full dep (in SVN).

Also, feel free to let us know what you mean by "ldd complains" anytime.

> Yes, the libedit story is a happy accident.
> Although we both find ntpq/ntptrace useful, not everybody running an NTP daemon bothers checking that it runs properly, > hence why I made the dependency optional. Anyway, the dependency is small enough that it makes no difference, so I'll make > it a full dep (in SVN).

Thanks.

> Also, feel free to let us know what you mean by "ldd complains" anytime.

OK, fine, point taken.