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Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager
Quoting: 20-year-old Enlightenment E16 bug finally gets patched —
No one can tell software developer Kamila Szewczyk that newer is better: She just fixed a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16, the old-school Linux window manager she favors partly because, she tells us, it is actually finished software.
For those unfamiliar, E16 is the long-lived DR16 branch of Enlightenment, a still-developing Linux window manager that first hit the FOSS space in 1997. E16 was introduced in 1999 and is still maintained to this day by a dedicated band of devs like Szewczyk, who noted in her writeup on the bug she discovered that she is one of a small community of "hardcore enthusiasts" who still use and maintain the aged window manager.
Szewczyk, 21, explained in her blog that she found the bug while doing some last-minute work on a slide deck to be used in a course she's teaching as a graduate student at Saarland University in Germany.
"I had a couple of PDFs with lecture slides and an exercise sheet typeset in LaTeX. At some point, I opened one of them in Atril, and the entire desktop froze," Szewczyk wrote. It happened repeatedly until she sussed out the root cause: E16 was hanging whenever it tried to truncate the overly long name of the file she was working with.
It's FOSS:
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21-year-old Polish Woman Fixed a 20-year-old Linux Bug!
Okay, not a Linux bug in the kernel, but one that has existed in the Enlightenment window manager E16 since 2006, when Kamila Szewczyk was barely a year old.
Kamila, now a 21-year-old graduate student at Saarland University in Germany, daily drives a window manager that predates most of her classmates. That alone is a fun fact.
But what makes it remarkable is that she didn't just use it, she dug into its decades-old codebase, found a bug that had been hiding there since 2006, and fixed it.