Decade Old KDE Bug Fixed

hypnosec writes "How long does a bug take to get resolved? A week? A month? A year? Well, a bug prevalent in the KDE libraries since 2002 has finally been resolved after a decade it has been revealed. The bug was present in the "Reject Cross-Domain Cookies" feature of KDE Libraries. Thiago Macieira noted in the KDE Libraries Revision 974b14b8 that he observed that his web cookies were being forgotten following a kded restart."

KDE

[jones_supa]

Heh, gratz for fixing that one. KDE is the best UNIX DE. Reasonably fast, relatively robust, smooth to use, and very configurable. Lots of nice apps and widgets to play with, too.

Re:Can't decide if it's embarrassing or impressive

[dubbreak]

After RTFA (I know, broke the rules), it appears it wasn't a documented or tracked bug. It was noticed and fixed more than a decade after it was created. Pretty much non-news. If no one ever noticed or cared that their cookies were getting lost on a kde restart then how can you expect it to get fixed? If no one calls it a bug, is it actually a bug?

I've had a similar experience. I was working with a system and found a bug that had been around since the initial system (>3 years), and jumping into the old source control (I had to crack open visual source safe since that's what they were using originally..blech ..moved to hg after I started and bitched that even cvs would be better). Basics of it were: request sent, response received but ignored/not read, retry sent, original message response used. It kicked into a retry sequence even try despite having a response. Eventually this caused issues communicating to a certain device. Put the sniffer on and voila, see double requests despite getting an immediate response. No one ever noticed because it didn't cause issues with any other devices. Yes, extra traffic on the bus, but there was plenty of bandwidth and most of the devices handled it fine. It should have been caught in original testing. When writing your own protocol to talk over serial you'd assume they'd do a little more testing than a sniff test ("oh.. looks like it's working. Good enough for production! Let's ship it!"). I spent most of my time fixing bugs and most were that old but that's the only one I can remember that you would think would have been noticed earlier.

Functionality wasn't affected

[lbbros]

If you read another developer's response to this commit [kde.org] you will see that the actual feature (reject cross domain cookies) was not affected by this blunder: instead the issue was completely different and only occurred when the KDE daemon was restarted.

Déjà vu...

[Kelerei]

...Slashdot reported on a 25 year old BSD bug being resolved [slashdot.org] back in May 2008.

And these are just the ones we know about -- there may be yet older bugs (particularly in proprietary, closed-source systems, where the source cannot be reviewed by the general community).