On 2016-12-20 08:55-0000 p.d.rosenb...@gmail.com wrote: > I made and pushed the change last night to use urandom over random, but Pedro is probably correct, the getrandom() function may be the best solution. I can make that change later today.
I agree that getrandom has a nice interface compared to what it wraps (i.e., it also internally uses /dev/urandom with /dev/random as a fallback). However, I am not convinced this is the way we should go now. The problem is getrandom is Linux specific and only available for newer Linux systems. For example, I just did a complete search of all packages I could install for getrandom, and it is not available on Debian Jessie! In contrast /dev/urandom seems to be available on virtually all Linux systems and more important many Unix systems, and /dev/random is a posix standard I believe, i.e., it should be available on all Unix systems as a fallback if /dev/urandom is not available. So I think we should stick with the status quo here, and maybe revisit this a year or so from now when likely getrandom will be a lot more common on at least Linux, and maybe at the point it will have spread to other unices as well. But POSIX changes are slow... Also, it is getting relatively close to release (still likely on December 27th), and we finally have gotten one foot on dry land with the long pause problem and Pedro's segfault issue so I would prefer we not make further changes and instead test what we do have now with appropriate comprehensive tests on systems with access to the needed unix tools (bash, etc.), i.e., MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and Cygwin on Windows and Linux, Mac OS X, and traditional Unix systems, Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Developer Access Program for Intel Xeon Phi Processors Access to Intel Xeon Phi processor-based developer platforms. With one year of Intel Parallel Studio XE. Training and support from Colfax. Order your platform today.http://sdm.link/intel _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
