Re: Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Replace PostmasterRandom() with a stronger way of generating ran

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> wrote:
> I'm going to try implementing prngd support. It seems easy enough, and prngd
> can be run on modern systems too, which is important for testing it.

TBH, if pandemolon is the only system in the BF that doesn't have any
other source of entropy, I think that's going 100% in the wrong
direction. Even with prngd support, this carries a significant risk
of effectively desupporting a large number of obscure UNIX platforms,
which I think is a bad decision. It's fine (IMHO) to have
optimizations in the code here and there that cater to Windows and
Linux because those are the most widely-used platfoms, but we've been
pretty diligent about trying to be portable to a wide variety of
UNIX-like platforms. I think that's a good decision, and reversing it
over the strength of cancel keys seems like letting the tail wag the
dog.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company