While he said as of August 23rd that he's agin working on ntimed, that's not reflected in GitHub updates: https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed
And it bears mentioning that ESR has been working on GPSD for more than a decade (a daemon to extract accurate time from GPS receivers), and he sure sounds math literate to my not entirely untutored ears in various discussions over the years.
Given the well known curse of total rewrites, which I've experienced myself, I too know who I'd bet my money on.
This is the standard ESR parlor trick. Eric took several courses in math and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-eric-raym...
"As a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania Raymond was immediately marked out as a potential math prodigy. Having found school insufficiently stretching for his above average talents, however, he lacked the necessary discipline or emotional maturity to cope with the demands of an undergraduate course, and after suffering a "math burnout" left without a degree."
Saying that GPSD is "a daemon to extract accurate time from GPS receivers" is a little misleading. GPSd primary function is to make "data on the location/course/velocity of the sensors available to...the host computer." It also has functionality to share data with ntpd but timekeeping is certainly not the primary purpose.
> ESR has been working on GPSD for more than a decade
Timekeeping and location calculation is very easy to do clean sheet. That is, until you start to hit corner cases and exceptions and the realities of physical real world inputs like jitter and offset and dispersion (and those are just the grit that ntpq tells you about) and all the crud humans made up like leap seconds and calendrical calculations.
My money's on the guy who's been blowing the grit out of the machine.
Oh, certainly. But from what I've followed of this project, that part of nntpd is, while complicated, healthy and neither needs serious modification nor is slated for much more than maybe adding tests. It's the huge pile of cruft that accumulated around the core that's getting worked on, or simply removed.
And it bears mentioning that ESR has been working on GPSD for more than a decade (a daemon to extract accurate time from GPS receivers), and he sure sounds math literate to my not entirely untutored ears in various discussions over the years.
Given the well known curse of total rewrites, which I've experienced myself, I too know who I'd bet my money on.