Re: RFS: jabbin

[Kapil Hari Paranjape <kapil@imsc.res.in>]

Hello,

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Andrew Donnellan wrote:
> On 8/25/06, Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> wrote:
> >Err, I don't think that __GNUC__ actually guarantees the presence of
> >/dev/random.  So this patch does not seem to be correct.
> >
> >(Although /dev/random, if you have it, is probably a better source of
> >randomness than rdtsc, or gethrtime.)
> 
> So what would be the alternative? Would we have to use a makefile hack
> (e.g. test for the existence of /dev/random and set a compile flag) or
> something to figure out what random seed we should use?

Unless you need cryptographically secure random-ness (which is
unlikely since this is a test suite) any pseudo-random generator
should be adequate as a source of randomness. So you could use (for
example) some post-header portion of a gzipped file. Of course, this
gives you "deterministic random-ness" which sounds like an
oxymoron---but isn't according to recent results in Complexity!

Regards,

Kapil.
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