Re: Should Emacs provide a uuid function?

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 09 May 2011 10:23:06 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote: 

EZ> Feh.  Using platform-dependent interfaces in Lisp is not the Emacs
EZ> way, in my book.  How about a primitive which would read from
EZ> /dev/random or /dev/urandom if they are available, or use other
EZ> methods if they are not?
...
EZ> This all will be avoided if we instead provide a primitive that will
EZ> both hide system-dependent stuff and avoid the need to teach
EZ> insert-file-contents about this special device.

GnuTLS has facilities for this, using /dev/*random and the Yarrow
algorithm from libnettle.  Look at lib/nettle/rnd.c
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnutls.git;a=tree;f=lib/nettle;hb=HEAD
for the `do_trivia_source' and `do_device_source' functions.

Since GnuTLS is enabled by default in Emacs 24 maybe we can rely on that
functionality instead of writing it anew?

Ted