[Python-Dev] hash randomization in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Feb 22 07:57:54 CET 2012

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:20 PM, <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

I'm with Antoine here - being able to force a particular seed still matters for testing purposes. However, the documentation of the option may need to be updated for 3.3 to emphasise that it should only be used to reproduce sporadic failures. Using it to work around applications that can't cope with randomised hashes would be rather ill-advised.

In the tracker, someone proposed that the option is necessary to synchronize the seed across processes in a cluster. I'm sure people will use it for that if they can.

Yeah, that use case sounds reasonable, too. Another example is that, even within a machine, if two processes are using shared memory rather than serialised IPC, synchronising the hashes may be necessary. The key point is that there are valid use cases for forcing a particular seed, so we shouldn't take that ability away.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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