[metapost] non-deviant "deviates"

[Hartmut Henkel]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005, Larry Siebenmann wrote:

> Have I a small but annoying bug/misfeature in the compilation of
> metapost in OzTeX on Macintosh?

> [...] The 'deviate' values at successive launches are very often the
> same because my compilation of metapost turns out to measure time in
> whole seconds in this situation.

> Who has a metapost compilation that is free of this misfeature?

It's ok in mpost as of teTeX-3.0, which uses gettimeofday() counted in
microseconds. The decision which system time function to use as seed
seems to depend on configure before compilation, see mpextra.c. Maybe
somehow gettimeofday() isn't available in OzTeX, or configure guessed
wrongly.

Regards, Hartmut