Bug#822221: ITP: flipcoin -- flip an adjustable coin for random exit status
Hi Rudi!
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* Rudi Cilibrasi <cilibrar@alumni.caltech.edu>, 2016-04-21, 23:11:
* Package name : flipcoin
Version : 1.0.0
Upstream Author : Rudi Cilibrasi <cilibrar@alumni.caltech.edu>
* URL : https://github.com/rudi-cilibrasi/flipcoin
Um, this page says "0 releases". Has 1.0.0 actually been released?
I'm an enthusiast of small programs that do one thing well. But I'd
expect a program which is that short to be perfectly polished, and this
one is not. Here's my review of this code:
if (argc > 1)
probability = atof(argv[1]);
No error handling... I'd expect to see an error message when the
probability cannot be parsed, or it is out of range would be helpful, or
there are too many arguments.
memset(&maxInt, 0xff, sizeof(maxInt));
"maxInt = -1" is would be a more obvious way to write it, IMHO.
fp = fopen("/dev/urandom", "rb");
if (fp == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Error: Cannot open /dev/urandom.\n");
The error message doesn't say what the error was, or what program
caused this error.
exit(2);
This exit code should be documented in the manpage.
if (fread(&valInt, 1, sizeof(valInt), fp) != sizeof(valInt)) {
fprintf(stderr, "Error: Cannot read from /dev/urandom.\n");
exit(2);
Same problems are above.
return ((probability * ((double) maxInt)+1.0) < valInt);
This is off-by-one, making the return value slightly biased towards 0.
Both COPYING and LICENSE exist and they are identical. Surely one would
be enough? :-)
There is no test suite...
All in all, I don't think this is mature enough to be uploaded to Debian
at this time.
--
Jakub Wilk
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