Even great programmers can be terribly misguided [LWN.net]

Even great programmers can be terribly misguided

Posted Jun 3, 2026 14:29 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
In reply to: Even great programmers can be terribly misguided by bignose
Parent article: Tridgell: rsync and outrage

> His LLM-generated changes resulted in a rash of new regressions

More like his security bug fixes (reported with help of LLMs) caused regressions that were not catched by the testsuite despite the testsuite being significantly expanded (with help of LLM).

That is hardly news that closing security holes causes regressions - some because users relied on insecure behavior, some because maintainer went overboard when closing the hole and disabled valid usecases too.

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Even great programmers can be terribly misguided

Posted Jun 5, 2026 0:27 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> That is hardly news that closing security holes causes regressions - some because users relied on insecure behavior, some because maintainer went overboard when closing the hole and disabled valid usecases too.

I was hit by one of these recently. A recent CUPS release fixed a bunch of vulnerabilities (https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/releases/tag/v2.4.17), and the fix for the first one in that list was so broken that it needed to be repaired not once (https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/releases/tag/v2.4.18) but twice (https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/releases/tag/v2.4.19). In the middle of tax filling season in my country. And the computer connected to the printer didn't have a user account with the same username as the user account being used to do the taxes on the other computer. The log messages weren't exactly helpful.

(The workaround, once I found https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups/issues/1557 which explained the issue, was: print to PDF, and copy the file to a user account which has the same username as an account which does exist on that computer connected to the printer. Printing from that user account worked fine, which was really confusing until I found the explanation that the username somehow matters, even though it's not authenticating to the server at all.)