Re: Still wondering about random numbers...

On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 04:36:23PM +0000,
Thomas Lockhart <lockhart(at)fourpalms(dot)org> wrote:
>
> configure is our friend. A better random number generator is always
> welcome imho, and if it can be reliably supported through autoconf then
> it would stand a chance to be included in the main tree. Especially
> since the usage of random() seems to be very isolated in the code.
> contrib/ is always a good first step though...

'Better' is in the eye of the beholder. /dev/random can stall for
very long periods of time waiting for entropy. Even /dev/urandom may
be overkill for some uses of random numbers. There is also the question
of how many bytes the function is going to return.

While it would be nice to have some access to /dev/random and /dev/urandom,
I don't know that replacing the current random function is the best way
to do this.