Re: random doesn't feel very random

[Nix]

On 4 Sep 2012, Paul Eggert told this:

> On 09/04/2012 12:19 PM, Nix wrote:
>> I'd recommend using /dev/urandom unconditionally,
>> certainly for rare seeding operations
>
> Yes, gnulib will have a module to do that, and that's
> good enough for rare operations, but it's not enough
> in general.

Oh, agreed. But Emacs already *has* a PRNG, and nobody is suggesting
replacing it, just changing how it's seeded (and maybe making it support
multiple state vectors). For a single seeding, /dev/random is quite
enough.

>              Applications like 'shred' need lots of random
> data and /dev/urandom is too slow for that.  For example,

Oh yes, definitely agreed. You can get random noise sources on the order
of kilobits per second cheaply, but anything much faster than that
requires a PRNG anyway, so /dev/random devolves into an expensive one of
those.

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