Comment 13 for bug 83604

Looks like it's actually quite easy to take the fallback option.

The attached patch makes ntpdate use /etc/ntp.conf only if it's readable and non-empty. This fixes the breakage in case a tool has created an empty configuration file for ntp.conf. The ntp configuration in /etc/ntp.conf is still used if the ntp package is installed and brings with it a proper configuration file (or if one happens to exist for some other reason).