[Python-Dev] BDFL ruling request: should we block forever waiting for high-quality random bits? (original) (raw)
Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Thu Jun 9 23:54:15 EDT 2016
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[Nikolaus Rath]
Aeh, what the tin says is "return random bytes".
[Larry Hastings]
What the tin says is "urandom", which has local man pages that dictate exactly how it behaves. On Linux the "urandom" man page says:
A read from the /dev/urandom device will not block waiting for more entropy. If there is not sufficient entropy, a pseudorandom number generator is used to create the requested bytes. os.urandom() needs to behave like that on Linux, which is how it behaved in Python 2.4 through 3.4.
I agree (with Larry). If the change hadn't already been made, nobody would get anywhere trying to make it now. So best to pretend it was never made to begin with ;-)
The tin that will say "return random bytes" in Python will
besecrets.token_bytes(). That's self-evidently (to me) where the
"possibly block forever" implementation belongs.
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