Re: setseed accepts bad seeds

Kris Jurka <books@ejurka.com> writes:
> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Tom Lane wrote:
>> It's not really possible to use it "incorrectly", AFAICS.  Any value you
>> might pass to it will result in a specific new seed value.  Nowhere is
>> there any guarantee of what the mapping is, and it's obviously
>> impossible to guarantee that the mapping is one-to-one, so any user
>> assumptions about what a specific seed value might "mean" seem broken
>> regardless.

> Then please consider this patch which checks the range and maps the
> provided value to the entire seed space.

I'm still not very happy about this.  It'll change the behavior of
existing applications, in the service of no goal that I consider
convincing.

I'd be inclined to leave the mapping alone and just insert a warning
(or hard error) for inputs outside the range -1 to 1.

            regards, tom lane