> I understand your suggestion as changing the contract to satisfy those who falsely think they actually need "/dev/random" even if they don't.
Not exactly. /dev/urandom also sucks, because it's slow, and it never blocks, even when the system knows that it can't deliver cryptographically-strong entropy.
There should only be one interface, and it should deliver cryptographically-strong random bytes at high speed and with high reliability. There is currently no character device on Linux that does this.
> I however prefer having both and expecting from the programmers to actually understand what they need.
I'd prefer it too, but it's unrealistic. Keeping up with the state-of-the-art in crypto is a job for specialists, and even halfway-decent crypto implementers make RNG mistakes on a regular basis.
Not exactly. /dev/urandom also sucks, because it's slow, and it never blocks, even when the system knows that it can't deliver cryptographically-strong entropy.
There should only be one interface, and it should deliver cryptographically-strong random bytes at high speed and with high reliability. There is currently no character device on Linux that does this.
> I however prefer having both and expecting from the programmers to actually understand what they need.
I'd prefer it too, but it's unrealistic. Keeping up with the state-of-the-art in crypto is a job for specialists, and even halfway-decent crypto implementers make RNG mistakes on a regular basis.