Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: nvm.stripped versus botan

[Jack Lloyd]

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