[Python-Dev] hash randomization in 3.3

[Nick Coghlan]

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