KDE Bug Fixed After 13 Years (kate-editor.org)

About 50 KDE developers met this week in the Swiss Alps for the annual Randa Meetings, "seven days of intense in-person work, pushing KDE technologies forward and discussing how to address the next-generation demands for software systems." Christoph Cullmann, who maintains the Kate editor, blogs that during this year's sprint, they finally fixed a 13-year-old bug. He'd filed the bug report himself -- back in 2003 -- and writes that over the next 13 years, no one ever found the time to fix it. (Even though the bug received 333 "importance" votes...) After finally being marked Resolved, the bug's tracking page at KDE.org began receiving additional comments marveling at how much time had passed. Just think, when this bug was first reported:
-- The current Linux Kernel was 2.6.31...
-- Windows XP was the most current desktop verison. Vista was still 3 years away.
-- Top 2 Linux verions? Mandrake and Redhat (Fedora wouldn't be released for another 2 months, Ubuntu's first was more than a year away.)

Comments

Slashdot

[allo]

And slashdot doesn't even try to describe the bug in the summary.

"no one ever found the time to fix it"

[MoarSauce123]

And I bet in the end it took 10 minutes to do the job. This is nothing but a testament of wrong priorities of project leadership. Fix the stuff that people are already using rather than cramming in more broken features that users did fine without so far. I guess users are fine with subpar quality even in FOSS projects.

Re:2.4.

[Kjella]

.dnuora daeh ruoy nruT ."daeh ym ni ti kniht I yaw eht s'taht" tpecxe refas gnihtemos otni noisserpxe eht paws ot ton nosaer orez s'erehT .edoc ylgu si edoc daB

You say it like "what's in your head" is some small insignificant function of source code. There's a reason it's not in binary like a computer would prefer, it's so we humans can work on it. Whenever you're given a problem like "solve for x" everybody in western countries ends up with "x = [value]" not "[value] = x". Sure you could learn to read backwards too, like the text above but it's extremely annoying unless you force yourself to learn it. Personally I'd rather have banned the "=" operator and made it ":=" for assignment, "==" for comparison. You could keep the complex operators like "+=" etc. but not just the equal sign. That we don't use for equality, I mean it should be obvious something's not all that smart here.