[Gmsh] Random behaviour in Gmsh

[Serban.Georgescu at uk.fujitsu.com]

Dear all,

I have a question regarding the random behaviour of Gmsh.
Basically, every time I run Gmsh on the same file I get a different mesh. Sometimes the differernce is very small, but there are times when it quite large. For example, for the same CAD file and meshing parameters, half of the time I am getting a good mesh while half of the time I get one that crashes the solver (because of a few "flat" elements).

Doing some googleing on the subject I found out that this is the intended behaviour of Gmsh and that this randomness cannot be stopped.  However, it is very inconvenient for us, one reason being that we cannot support other users since we cannot reproduce their exact problems.

My question is whether it would be OK to just fix the random seed inside the source code. In this way the algorith should still work as intended, but the results will be reproducible. Has anybody done this before? Is this OK to do?

Thanks in advance,
Serban

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