TAG | 25 years to fix an open source bug |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Tuesday, 13 May 2008 | |
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As Balmer explains in his blog, the bug had been observed by the Samba development team, which had written its own code as an alternative to the faulty BSD routines. And I'm inclined to believe that other programmers must have encountered the problem as well. But it seems nobody thought to tell the BSD developers. BSD and its derivatives provide functions called telldir(), readdir(), seekdir() and readdir() for working with directories. Balmer established they do contain a bug, just as the Samba team suspected. In some circumstances, calling seekdir() does not return to the correct position in the directory stream. The good news is that he went the extra mile to find and fix the underlying issue. "The fix is surprisingly simple, not to say trivial", he wrote. Balmer says the fix has now been applied to FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonflyBSD, and has been committed to the OpenBSD patch branches. "I don't know anyone in Apple, but they will eventually figure it out themselves", he wrote. Possibly: Apple does not have an exemplary record when it comes to promptly applying updates to open source software to the code that ships with Mac OS X.
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