[Python-Dev] BDFL ruling request: should we block forever waiting for high-quality random bits? (original) (raw)

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Wed Jun 15 16:30:33 EDT 2016

On 06/15/2016 01:01 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

For 3.6+, we can instead make it so that the only things that actually rely on cryptographic quality randomness being available are:

- calling a secrets module API - calling a random.SystemRandom method - calling os.urandom directly

However, we don't need to make those block waiting for randomness to be available - we can update them to raise BlockingIOError instead (which makes it trivial for people to decide for themselves how they want to handle that case).

Along with that change, we can make it so that starting the interpreter will never block waiting for cryptographic randomness to be available (since it doesn't need it), and importing the random module won't block waiting for it either.

+1

-- Ethan

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