Summary: | strfry() gives skewed distributions | ||
---|---|---|---|
Product: | glibc | Reporter: | Aurelien Jarno <aurelien> |
Component: | string | Assignee: | Not yet assigned to anyone <unassigned> |
Status: | REOPENED --- | ||
Severity: | normal | CC: | awreece, coleharrisjohnson, gabravier, glibc-bugs, kirill, lynneandallan, sam |
Priority: | P2 | Flags: | fweimer:
security-
|
Version: | unspecified | ||
Target Milestone: | --- | ||
Host: | x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu | Target: | x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu |
Build: | x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu | Last reconfirmed: | 2012-05-06 00:00:00 |
Description
Aurelien Jarno
2007-04-21 22:36:13 UTC
This function is a joke. Don't you have better things to do? It's not worth arguing about and so to safe me time I added a modifeed versson of the patch. Your version is still not right, as now some strings could not appear anymore. For example for the string "abc" the strings "abc" and "acb" could never appear. The version already attached to this bug report returns all cases with a correct distribution. Stop wasting people's time! Nobody cares about this crap. I made a last change but it's just too embarasing to even admit that. (In reply to comment #3) > Stop wasting people's time! Nobody cares about this crap. I made a last change > but it's just too embarasing to even admit that. Refusing someone else's better free code without reason? You're a dick. You-- Please do not reopen bugs spuriously, thank you. 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. Just a small dwarf wishing you a happy April 1st! Still a issue in current git. *** Bug 260998 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** Seen from the domain http://volichat.com Page where seen: http://volichat.com/adult-chat-rooms Marked for reference. Resolved as fixed @bugzilla. Well, nothing in the doco (http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/strfry.html) for strfry() stated that all combinations would be equally likely. The only mention of uniform distribution was that it was used to do the swaps themselves, not that the results would be uniformly distributed. In any case, when I make stir fry, it's rarely distributed perfectly. Having said that, Ulrich probably spent more time complaining about the patch than it would have taken to just put the damn thing in :-) I have to go with Reuben here. If it's a joke, get rid of it, it has no place in a serious piece of software. If not, we should be willing to accept patches that make it better in some way, given any constraints from elsewhere (such as time needed by maintainers to do it). Isn't this fixed ? Looking at current source it appears to have a proper Fisher-Yates shuffle for strfry now |