--------------------------------
A brief of the openrdate history
--------------------------------

* Christos Zoulas developed rdate in 1994 and subsequent years (versions
  1.0 up to 1.4) for OpenBSD project.

* Between 2005 and 2008, David Snyder (and other volunteers later)
  developed openrdate[1], fully based in rdate (but it is another
  project). There are several contributions from other projects as
  Debian.

* Since 2019, the project is being maintained by new volunteers[2].
  openrdate is being packaged in Debian, openSUSE, Fedora and other
  distributions[3].

 [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/openrdate
 [2] https://github.com/resurrecting-open-source-projects/openrdate
 [3] https://repology.org/project/openrdate/versions

 -- Joao Eriberto Mota Filho <eriberto@eriberto.pro.br>  Thu, 26 Sep 2019 11:18:09 -0300



---------------------------
David Snyder - Original POV
---------------------------

David Snyder wrote a README file for openrdate with some reports. See
below the most interesting parts.


--------------------------------------

1. Motivations for OpenRdate

I came over to Linux from OpenBSD. With that sort of background, it
wasn't too hard to get around Linux. The only thing which bugged me was
the lack of a proper 'rdate'. There was a dodgy little utility called
'netdate', but this didn't work on my, primarily, OpenBSD system. So, I
asked, why isn't there rdate.  Well, there is one
(http://freshmeat.net/projects/rdate/), but it's only half the rdate I
was used to on OpenBSD. It only hit the RFC 868 side-of-the-house, and I
wanted the full monty (as it were :) ). Therefore, I did this little
project. It'll hit and set the time on the machine both from RFC 868
time-servers (on the inetd's time port 37) and RFC 2030 protocol SNTP/NTP
servers (on ntpd's port 123). As an added bonus, I also got to port an
OpenBSD app to the outside world.

---------------------------------------

2. Changes

The changes/additions to the files of the original OpenBSD rdate have
been minimal.  Only two files have had to be changed (due to the
excellent *BSD coders):

rdate.c - Added a check and inclusion of 'config.h' and changed an
          #ifndef from NO_UTIL to #ifdef HAVE_UTIL_H

ntp.c - Added a check for __GLIBC__ and made a definition for SA_LEN
        (which Linux doesn't define for their sockaddr).

Other than that, not much had to be changed or added.  I thought I had a
problem with getaddrinfo(), but that was only due to, as we said in the
Army, 'vapor lock on the brain'.

----------------------------------------

3. Attributions and Copywrite

I've tried to put the proper attributions for the code for openrdate in
the AUTHORS file.  If I've missed you, let me know.  The license of this
software is, as shown in the parts and pieces of this project, BSD.
Hopefully, I've covered all the different types of BSD-licenses used in
the code in the COPYING file, but, once again, tell me if I missed one or
another.

Finally, I'd like to thank the coders, bug-hunters, and users of OpenBSD.
You all run a tightship, and it's been a pleasure to work with some of
your code.

David Snyder
dasnyderx at yahoo dot com
