Re: Noob dumb question (extending emacs)

[Yuri Khan]

(Sorry for the previous unfinished email.)

On Sat, 23 Oct 2021 at 00:55, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:

> For people interested, manual explains about randomity:
> (info "(elisp) Random Numbers")
>
> How I understand it, than it may be that neither `pwgen' is generating
> truly random numbers.

Inspecting the source shows pwgen uses /dev/urandom if available, and
/dev/random otherwise, and all bytes of the password come from one of
those sources. These are as random as you can get and use thermal
noise in your HDD as one of the sources of randomness.

On the other hand, the manual for Emacs ‘random’ says:

    A deterministic computer program cannot generate true random numbers.
    For most purposes, “pseudo-random numbers” suffice.

Spoiler: secure password generation is not one of those purposes.