Decade Old KDE Bug Fixed 129
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."
No one wants to fix unglamorous bugs (Score:3, Insightful)
People work on problems that are (a) fun to solve and (b) will bring them acclaim.
Tiny, ugly, boring bugs don't do that and so in many software projects they get overlooked the longest.
Users weren't affected until recently (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to spoil the fun, but the developer who found the bug fixed it "after a few months" according to the check-in comment. The code may have been buggy for a decade, but that doesn't mean that anybody was affected during that time. Once someone was affected (the developer), it was fixed in a much shorter timescale than this article makes you believe.
Re:Can't decide if it's embarrassing or impressive (Score:4, Insightful)
Reboots aren't as necessary in Linux.
And I'm assuming that this only affects KDE cookies, so you'd only see this if you used Konqueror as your browser. I imagine most KDE users are using Firefox, Chome or another browser like that.
Re:Who Cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
With Open Source, if a bug is a real problem, then you can fix it.
Wrong. This is the big lie of Open Source.
I can write a patch but I can't force them to accept it. Which makes sense -- you can't have random people messing with your code.
I can only write a patch if I am proficient in whatever language they are using AND I am intimately familiar with the code base so that I know where to look.
Unless you are an expert programmer, with commit access to the codebase, open source is meaningless.
Re:Who Cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Commits are another story.