[Bug libc/4403] strfry() gives skewed distributions

["rrt at sc3d dot org" <sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org>]

------- Additional Comments From rrt at sc3d dot org  2010-09-16 12:05 -------
This bug is apparently still not fixed. See:

http://www.eglibc.org/archives/patches/msg00646.html

which provides a patch.

Ulrich wrote, earlier in the thread:

> This function is a joke.  Don't you have better things to do?

The problem is that the function is not marked as a joke, and only its name (and
some elements of the description) is actually funny. The task that is does is
something reasonable to want to do, and it seems reasonably simple to provide a
good implementation, so why not? glibc is a high quality product, so let's make
the jokes high quality too!

If on the other hand the glibc maintainers do not consider this function to be
worth maintaining to the high standards of glibc, then please either remove it,
or remove its documentation, or mark it as "obsolete, do not use", which should
stop people both from using it and from reporting bugs.

Without any such action, it seems unreasonable to say that bug reports about
this function are wasting the maintainers' time.

memfrob is a much better example of how to make this type of joke: its much
simpler algorithm is obviously correct, as it has no statistical complexities,
and its man page explains that it's useless for encryption. Hence, no-one is
going to complain that it's bad for encryption, and no-one is going to find
implementation bugs.

In a library as high-profile and important as glibc, bad jokes are going to come
back and bite you just like other bad design decisions. If the maintainers don't
understand this, the joke, if there is one here, is very much on them.

-- 
           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|FIXED                       |


http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4403

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