Re: Poor buildfarm coverage of strong-random alternatives

Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> writes:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 03:56:52PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> More urgently, what about the lack of --disable-strong-random
>> coverage? I feel like we should either have a buildfarm
>> critter or two testing that code, or decide that it's no longer
>> interesting and rip it out. backend_random.c, to name just
>> one place, has a complex enough !HAVE_STRONG_RANDOM code path
>> that I don't feel comfortable letting it go totally untested.

> If that proves to not be useful, just dropping the switch sounds like
> a good option to me. I would be curious to hear Heikki on the matter
> as he has introduced the switch in the v10 time-frame.

I might be misremembering, but I think it was me that pressed to have
that switch in the first place :-). The reason my feelings have changed
on the matter is mainly that we recently moved the compiler goalposts
to C99. That reduces to about nil the chances of people being able to
build PG on pre-turn-of-the-century platforms, at least without a lot
of add-on software. So the idea that we should be able to cope with
platforms lacking /dev/urandom has correspondingly dropped in value.
Judging by our buildfarm sample, nothing released in this century
lacks /dev/urandom.

regards, tom lane