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."
Can't decide if it's embarrassing or impressive (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe a little of both. Clearly, they had other priorities and this just fell through the cracks.
"turns out that mCrossDomain was of value 127": For some reason reminds me of the time Linus blew up at Mauro a little while ago also for returning a value that makes no sense (made worse by dancing around the issue).
Re:Can't decide if it's embarrassing or impressive (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to consider my cross-domain cookies getting lost a feature. I never noticed the bug -- and I have been using KDE since before it was introduced.
There are legitimate uses for cookies, for sure, but the vast majority of them seem to serve no other purpose than tracking me. Which is occasionally fine in the case of wikipedia or slashdot keeping me logged in, but in the vast majority of cases _not_ OK.
What abot the many eyeballs? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
"With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow" Right?
Well, the theory of the many eyes say that someone somewhere should have noticed/reported/tracked this bug sooner rather than later.
this comes to prove that many eyes are NOT enough. First you need more than merely many eyes, you need many QUALIFIED eyes.
Second, you need to complement your (many) eyes with systematic test cases to so some QA, trying ad a modicum of rigor, instead of, you know, letting the QA become an ad-hoc subjective process...