From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 1826 invoked by alias); 16 Sep 2010 12:05:37 -0000 Received: (qmail 1791 invoked by uid 48); 16 Sep 2010 12:05:25 -0000 Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:05:00 -0000 Message-ID: <20100916120525.1790.qmail@sourceware.org> From: "rrt at sc3d dot org" To: glibc-bugs@sources.redhat.com In-Reply-To: <20070421223613.4403.aurelien@aurel32.net> References: <20070421223613.4403.aurelien@aurel32.net> Reply-To: sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org Subject: [Bug libc/4403] strfry() gives skewed distributions X-Bugzilla-Reason: CC Mailing-List: contact glibc-bugs-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: glibc-bugs-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2010-09/txt/msg00075.txt.bz2 ------- 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 ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug, or are watching someone who is.