"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."
"E16 had implemented its window-title truncation algorithm without an iteration limit. Without that limit, the middle-ellipsis search could bounce endlessly between truncation points, freezing the desktop."
"The fix, which she published as a patch against E16 1.0.30, makes three changes to prevent the issue from happening again: She capped iterations at 32, prevented negative corrections from producing a degenerate overlap, and guarded against a divide-by-zero error."
Kamila Szewczyk, a software developer, fixed a 20-year-old bug in the Enlightenment E16 window manager. E16, introduced in 1999, is still maintained by a small community. Szewczyk discovered the bug while preparing lecture slides, which caused the desktop to freeze due to an unbounded window-title truncation algorithm. She identified the issue and implemented a fix that capped iterations, prevented negative corrections, and guarded against divide-by-zero errors. This highlights the ongoing relevance of older software in the tech community.
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