Of the use of unpredictableSeed

[Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d]

Am Mon, 06 Mar 2017 22:04:44 -0500
schrieb "Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)"
<SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com>:

> On 03/06/2017 05:19 PM, sarn wrote:
> > On Monday, 6 March 2017 at 10:12:09 UTC, Shachar Shemesh wrote:  
> >> Excuse me if I'm asking a trivial question. Why not just seed it
> >> from /dev/urandom? (or equivalent on non-Linux platforms. I know
> >> at least Windows has an equivalent).
> >>
> >> Shachar  
> >
> > One reason is that /dev/urandom isn't always available, e.g., in a
> > chroot.  Sure, these are corner cases, but it's annoying when stuff
> > like this doesn't "just work".  
> 
> I don't claim to be any sort of linux expert or anything, but doesn't 
> chroot have a reputation for being a bit of a finicky, leaky
> abstraction anyway? I haven't really used them, but that's been my
> understanding...?

chroots were used for security stuff in the past (chrooting a ftp
server and similar stuff) and they're indeed a leaky abstraction in
that case.

However, chroots can also be used to 'chroot into another OS'. E.g.
people sometimes  chroot into the OS on a harddisk from a livecd. This
is sometimes useful to repair a system, install packages, ...

-- Johannes