The rand() can of worms

I realize I'm (as one person put it) "[stepping] right into the line of fire" on this, but I want to resolve the issues with Jeroen's big rand() patch. From what I can tell, there are 3 camps: 1) Leave it, let Jeroen fix it. We know it is broken, but we're willing to wait for Jeroen to get through school orientation so that he has time to fix it. 2) Revert the whole big mess. This camp seems to have an internal split. Some of them hate the idea of the patch entirely for things like BC, while others just seem upset with the way the patch was merged with (what appears to be) very little "peer review" (no matter who is at fault...I don't really care. :) We'll call these "2A" and "2B" respectively. 3) Just like any other bug: Those who are bothered by it, fix it The reason I'm writing this is because I'm in the third camp. I could care less if it gets reverted or fixed, really...I just want PHP to *work*. If it's going to stay, we should *all* be able to pitch in and fix it...I really don't want to wait around. I wouldn't wait around when Sybase-CT was broken even *much* smaller ways...even when I had to teach myself C in my spare time! This is Open Source...if it's broken, I get to fix it! That's the whole *point*, isn't it? Personally, I'm not bothered by the way in which backwards compatibility is destroyed by this patch, because I think it actually behaves more like most people expect rand() to now... Good points: 1) no need to seed the generator 2) use mt_rand by default Bad points: 1) Leaks 2) Inconsistent style 3) Really bizzare macros, etc. So, just to make my compile here happier (bcz I don't want to check out older CVS just to continue working), I have tried to fix some of the bad points. Since it is not clear to me yet which of the above camps is going to hold sway on this issue, I'm not going to commit them to CVS...but I *will* provides diffs for anyone who asks. After having thrown myself into the middle of a heated debate, I think I'm going to ignore php-dev for a few days until I'm ready to face the firestorm I know I'm stirring up. When the smoke clears, somebody please let me know. :)