> So within the context of RSpec testing itself, invoking the real srand is still bad, in my opinion. Whatever it is seeded with will serve as the seed from that point forward (i.e. srand 123 will result in the exact same results for every randomization after that, which means you might as well hard code the values that come from any randomization after that - randomizing ordering mitigates this slightly, but not enough).

Honestly, this doesn't bother me _at all_.  RSpec's test suite doesn't rely heavily on randomness, and where it does, we deal with it in such a way that I can't imagine it causing problems if an example "leaked" an `srand` call.  I'm willing to reconsider if you can show me an example of a seed that causes a problem for our existing specs.

If you're really concerned about this, I would be OK with adding this to `RSpec.configure` in `spec_helper.rb`:

``` ruby
RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.before(:each, :rand) do
    Kernel.srand(RSpec.configuration.seed)
  end
end
```

...and then tag example groups (or examples) that rely on randomness with `:rand` so that the random seed is re-set to the seed we're using for this test run