On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 09:11:06PM -0800, Zack Weinberg wrote: > Do you think we could get away with skipping es_unix if we have > something else, though? That's the really slow one.
Probably, yes. However what I would like to do here is figure out a seeding discipline such that - The default initial seed is reasonbly safe - The default seed is fast enough that nobody minds [or at least minds enough to complain to me ;)] - If someone wants to, they can initiate a seed using some, or all, of the sources. In particular I'd prefer not to simply disable particular sources, unless there really is no other workable solution. Having spent all of 3 minutes thinking about it, I'm wondering if the thing to do is drop the fast poll/slow poll distinction, which is pretty artificial, and instead use a notion like polling for no more than a given amount of time (possibly returning nothing if the source believes it cannot successfully poll in the given time slot [*]), or polling for a certain # of bits of entropy (estimated based on the particular sources knowledge/assumptions about what it is doing), or maybe both. [*] For instance by keeping a running average of some kind of how long previous poll requests took; I'm not sure if doing this is actually clever or cleverly stupid. -Jack _______________________________________________ Monotone-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
