Re: urandom number in Emacs

[Emanuel Berg]

Omar Polo wrote:

> I mean, if you really need something like that and emacs
> doesn't already provide it, why don't try cooking a diff to
> add it to base emacs instead that an external module?

`random' isn't good enough for passwords, it could since it is
a C built-in read from /dev/urandom but it doesn't, and you
can't do that from Lisp since /dev/urandom is a non-regular
file. head(1) and pwgen(1) can do it from C and so can Emacs,
but to have it as a Lisp primitive or a DM ... but isn't that
why you have DMs, you shouldn't have to recompile the whole
thing to get it? It is more ... modular?

> Also, the code is wrong:

>>  if (nbytes == 0) {
>>    return (rnd_num % max_num);
>>  } else {
>>    fprintf(stderr, "No entropy available!\n");
>>    exit(1);
>>  }
>
> I don't think you want to quit emacs unconditionally if
> there's no entropy.

OK ... I'll just return something to denote it didn't work.
Hm ...

> Also, in some circumstances there could be better (and
> faster) ways to obtain a random number, see for
> e.g. arc4random.

Doesn't that read from /dev/urandom as well?
What's better/faster about it? You need a DM/recompile for
that as well since it is in libc, or am I wrong?

Nah, if it was good enough for pwgen(1) I take it ...

> P.S.: are you sure about checking for EAGAIN? A read for
> a file descriptor not marked as non-blocking shouldn't fail
> with EAGAIN

I am not sure, again they had it in pwgen ...

> but that's a minor nitpick.

Indeed ... hehe

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