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[Python-Dev] BDFL ruling request: should we block forever waiting for high-quality random bits?

Tim Peters tim.peters at gmail.com
Fri Jun 10 16:04:48 EDT 2016 
[Tim]
>> secrets.token_bytes() is already the way to spell "get a string of
>> messed-up bytes", and that's the dead obvious (according to me) place
>> to add the potentially blocking implementation.

[Sebastian Krause]
> I honestly didn't think that this was the dead obvious function to
> use. To me the naming kind of suggested that it would do some
> special magic that tokens needed, instead of just returning random
> bytes (even though the best token is probably just perfectly random
> data). If you want to provide a general function for secure random
> bytes I would suggest at least a better naming.

There was ample bikeshedding over the names of `secrets` functions at
the time.  If token_bytes wasn't the obvious function to you, I
suspect you have scant idea what _is_ in the `secrets` module.   The
naming is logical in context, where various "token_xxx" functions
supply random-ish bytes in different formats.  In that context,
xxx=bytes is the obvious way to get raw bytes.
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