On Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:27:14 -0500, Terry Reedy wrote: [...] >> and should be treated as a bug. Raymond made a strong case arguing for >> repeatability, and then approved a bug fix that broke repeatability. I >> doubt that was deliberate. > > It was deliberate that randrange was changed to an even distribution > from a slightly uneven distribute. That implies a change in the pattern.
Okay, granted. > That was known and the main subject of discussion. As Antoine said, > making functions exactly repeatable across versions means not fixing > bugs or otherwise improving them. This statement is not limited to the > random module. > > You have persuaded me that the doc should be more explicit that while > the basic random.random sequence will be kept repeatable with seed set > (except perhaps after a changeover of several releases), the convenience > transformations can be changed if improvements are needed or thought > sufficiently desirable. A more explicit note will help, but the basic problem applies: how do you write deterministic tests given that the random.methods (apart from random.random itself) can be changed without warning? -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
