Re: [Colossus-developers] Random changes

[Clemens K. <lem...@sa...>]

 
> After re-subscribing, I notice we have a lot more activity these days.
> Nice to see :)

:o)


> Here's a patch I had lying around which moves us over to using

The patch looks ok to me, but I am slightly "in unfavour" of eliminating
DevRandom totally.

> SecureRandom library, rather than our own DevRandom.
> Unless, of course, there is some really good reason to keep DevRandom.
 
I guess the main reason why it exists is that earlier the default available
random stuff was not good enough so someone (Romain?) wanted to
provide the user a way to replace it's own random device (if a good one
was available).

It was occasionally quite convenient for reproducing certain bugs - I provided
some static file instead one of the /dev/*rand* and thus got the same sequece
of dice rolls (for moves, battle, whatever). So I could re-run it again and again
and have same behavior (e.g. "the angel striking the XXX makes exactly that
many hits that 2 carries are available which caused a certain bug" or like that).

This was especially in the beginning when I fixed some of the crash-type of
bugs which appeared only very "randomly", typically in battles.
IOW I didn't need it for quite a while.

Not sure whether that's a "good reason", but at least it's a reason :-/

Thus I would prefer to keep it, but we should certainly change DevRandom
to use as basis / default behavior SecureRandom ?

BR,

Clemens


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