Hi Junio,
On Mon, 12 Oct 2020, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Sean McAllister <smcallis@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> >> Sean McAllister <smcallis@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >>
> >> > +# generate a random 12 digit string
> >> > +gen_nonce() {
> >> > + test_copy_bytes 12 < /dev/urandom | tr -dc A-Za-z0-9
> >> > +}
> >>
> >> What is the randomness requirement of this application? IOW, what
> >> breaks if we just change this to "echo 0123456789ab"?
> >>
> >> Or "date | git hash-object --stdin" for that matter?
> >>
> >> We'd want to make our tests more predictiable, not less.
> >
> > The randomness requirement is just that I need nonces to be unique
> > during a single run of the HTTP server
> > as they uniquefy the files I put on disk to make the HTTP hack-ily
> > stateful. I'd be fine with your date/hash-object
> > solution, but I don't know that it will help make the tests more predictable.
>
> If so, would something like this be
>
> global_counter_for_nonce=0
> gen_nonce () {
> global_counter_for_nonce=$(( global_counter_for_nonce + 1 )) &&
> echo "$global_counter_for_nonce"
> }
>
> more appropriate? It is utterly predictable and yields the same
> answer only once during a single run.
We should also consider using `test-tool genrandom <seed>` instead (where
`<seed>` would have to be predictable, but probably would have to change
between `gen_nonce()` calls).
Ciao,
Dscho
