Your message dated Mon, 8 Sep 2014 17:13:26 +0000 (UTC) with message-id <[email protected]> and subject line Re: Bug#760857: mksh shoould not export $RANDOM has caused the Debian Bug report #760857, regarding mksh shoould not export $RANDOM to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with. If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith. (NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact [email protected] immediately.) -- 760857: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=760857 Debian Bug Tracking System Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---Package: mksh Version: 50b-1 Severity: normal Dear Maintainer, The $RANDOM variable should not be exported: it's useless, and it may fool scripts that try to detect if the shell provides it. $SHELL -c '/usr/bin/env|grep RANDOM' does the right thing in (at least) bash, busybox, zsh, while in mksh it prints the value of $RANDOM at the time /usr/bin/env was run. -- System Information: Debian Release: jessie/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 3.14-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages mksh depends on: ii libc6 2.19-10 mksh recommends no packages. Versions of packages mksh suggests: ii ed 1.10-2 -- no debconf information
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--- Begin Message ---Lorenzo Beretta dixit: >The $RANDOM variable should not be exported: it's useless, and it may >fool scripts that try to detect if the shell provides it. This is an upstream decision, please continue this either on the mailing list (Cc’d) or (if you really must) the Launchpad tracker. Actually, this is not useless: it’s imported into subshells, and mksh reads the environment at startup and lets it contribute to entropy there. The absence of proper arc4random() in most operating systems is really a PITA. We might throw it away (and just use arc4random() if there, and… whatever… if not), for the sake of simplicity. But then, lesser platforms (such as GNU/Linux) would have worse entropy in $RANDOM values. That being said, there is a Pure mksh™ implementation of arc4random() around… only downside is, it reads a lot of bytes from /dev/urandom, which kills Linux’ inferiour kernel RNG as well… I wish we had access to AT_RANDOM, but glibc uses all of it for its own purposes instead of setting up an SRNG¹… Anyway, I do not discuss upstream things like this in the Debian bugtracker, as this is most definitely not a bug in the package. bye, //mirabilos ① stretching RNG -- „Cool, /usr/share/doc/mksh/examples/uhr.gz ist ja ein Grund, mksh auf jedem System zu installieren.“ -- XTaran auf der OpenRheinRuhr, ganz begeistert (EN: “[…]uhr.gz is a reason to install mksh on every system.”)
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