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A 35-Year-Old Bug in Patch Found in Efforts to Restore 29 Year Old 2.11BSD

posted by Fnord666 on Friday August 21 2020, @05:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the cleaning-the-window-sill dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A 35-year-old bug in patch found in efforts to restore 29 year old 2.11BSD:

Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's been a faithful alley [sic] for a long, long time. I've never had a problem with patch until I embarked on the 2.11BSD restoration project. In going over the logs very carefully, I've discovered a bug that bites this effort twice. It's quite interesting to use 27 year old patches to find this bug while restoring a 29 year old OS...

After some careful research, this turned out to be a fairly obscure bug in an odd edge case caused by "the state of email in the 1980s." which can be relegated to the dustbin of history...

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  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday August 21 2020, @02:16PM (2 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday August 21 2020, @02:16PM (#1039879) Journal

    If patch/diff was designed with some initial sanity on mind (technically, it is a strict imperative command language), it would use separate checksum for every command issued at least.

    Instead, while email/news did not guarantee a fixed transfer of text files, Unix freaks imposed a space hell on themselves, including tabs hell in makefiles.

    A magic number like this is a shameless shame.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 21 2020, @03:42PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday August 21 2020, @03:42PM (#1039932) Homepage
    Oh, yeah, adding semantic meaning to differences in whitespace was a terrible idea. Thank goodness nobody ever repeated that misnake.
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