Developer fixes 33-year-old Unix bug
An OpenBSD developer has discovered and fixed a bug in the software that has been traced back to an AT&T version of Unix from 1975.
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great developer!
great developer!I'm not sure about BSD, but
I'm not sure about BSD, but what is it they say about Windows? For every bug fixed two more are created. So it would not really matter if a bug takes 33 years to fix.Fixing a bug with origins
Fixing a bug with origins that old is very cool. But this is not a UNIX bug, it is a bug in yacc. Calling it a UNIX bug is misleading and factually incorrect. There are many (most?) UNIX systems that don't ever run yacc. And most modern versions, or even LINUX distributions, don't install it by default anymore.It is in fact correct to
It is in fact correct to call this a Unix bug, because yacc is part of the toolchain that is used to build Unix.Linux doesn't use yacc, but rather a compatible workalike called GNU Bison.
Bison is necessary for building many of the packages that go into a Linux distribution. So even if bison is not actually installed in the filesystem generated by that build process, it does generate C code which is part of that system's run time.
So, conceivably, a Linux distribution could have a bug due to a flaw in Bison, and people would call this a Linux bug.
Obviously, some problem in OpenBSD (a kind of Unix) was traced to a 1975 version of Yacc (a code-generator used as part of the Unix toolchain). So it's a Unix bug.
Even if yacc is not bundled
Even if yacc is not bundled with current distributions, how much of their content is derived from yacc-generated matter?Nobody likes a bug. But as
Nobody likes a bug. But as the author of Yacc, I'm torn between amazement that Yacc is still in use and still being debugged, and rue that my ancient bugs get such publicity. I'm amazed that Yacc runs at all on machines where pointers are bigger than ints, since this was undreamed of in 1973 when the first version appeared.As to Yacc being part of Unix, I think part of the confusion is that Unix is often used with two meanings--the operating system and the distribution. I'm not aware of any Yacc-generated code in the operating system proper (although on many platforms Yacc code is used in the C compiler). But many Unix applications (awk, eqn, etc.) are built around Yacc-generated parsers.