This is related to David Mertz's request for backward compatible initialization, not to the bdfl decision.
Steven D'Aprano writes: > I don't think that's something which the Python interpreter ought to do > for you, but you can write to /dev/urandom or /dev/random (both keep > their own, separate, entropy pools): > > open("/dev/urandom", "w").write("hello world") This fails for unprivileged users on Mac. I'm not sure what happens on Linux; it appears to succeed, but the result wasn't what I expected. Also, when entropy gets low, it's not clear how additional entropy is allocated between the /dev/random and /dev/urandom pools. > But of course there's the question of where you're going to get a > source of noise to write to the file. While it's (probably?) > harmless to write a hard-coded string to it, I don't think its > going to give you much entropy. Use a Raspberry-Pi, or other advanced expensive<wink/> hardware. There's no real excuse for not having a hardware generator if the Pi has one! I would guess you can probably get something with a USB interface for $20 or so. http://scruss.com/blog/2013/06/07/well-that-was-unexpected-the-raspberry-pis-hardware-random-number-generator/ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com