How come this wasn't covered by one or more automated tests that failed?

You mean Apache httpd ... the thing which is called a-patchy-httpd server? (that is not a joke!).

Apache httpd existed many years before junit was invented in 1997. Long before TDD became a thing and our rigorous modern understanding set in. For a second, I even thought the Apache Foundation (founded because of httpd) later hosted junit, but I was wrong, is the Eclipse Foundation.

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PuercoPop 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

junit was not invented, it was a port from Smalltalk's SUnit, which was created on 1989, ~6 years before the first release of Apache. Yes, the extreme programming (XP) craze hadn't popularized TDD, but united testing as a practice already existed, even if only some communities.

Though I agree, that although not a technical justification, an explanation as to why there are no tests is because Apache HTTP is from the 90's. Not writing unit tests was par for course back then. Most FLOSS code bases in the 90s didn't have unit tests, let a alone a CI to run the test suite for each change. Adding tests later is hard. Though there are some tests under the test folder.

	▲	oaiey a day ago \| parent [-]
		Now I learned something. Seems like I am not old enough

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sidewndr46 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What does this have to do with Junit?

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Macha 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Junit was one of the first libraries to popularise modern patterns of unit testing.

Some people were writing their own ad-hoc scaffolds before that but it wasn't a widespread practice. Testing meant manual testers clicking on things in the UI, and sophisticated testing was if you had checklists of things to test manually.

	▲	dlachausse 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Perl has had a very pervasive testing culture that predates Junit by a decade… https://www.perl.org/about/whitepapers/perl-testing.html

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oaiey 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My apologies for that. I always forget I am old ;). What Macha said.

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testplzignore 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Based on https://github.com/apache/httpd/commits?author=covener, either the committer never writes tests, or this project just doesn't do testing at all. Nothing here would pass a code review at my company. Totally insane.

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homebrewer 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Your company, and others like it, are of course entitled to a refund. These infrastructural projects never get any funding when everything goes well, but when an overworked maintainer screws up in good faith, everybody piles on them.

The attacks on OpenSSL maintainers ten years ago were disgusting, and I think we've learned nothing since then.

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Joker_vD 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

No, we've learned to stop using OpenSSL.

And ASF does receive funding, by the way, even if not much (slightly less than two and a half million USD in 2024).

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Macha 2 days ago | parent [-]

So let's pretend this only paid for employees. 5-15 employees depending on where they live. Let's assume 1-2 admin and 13 devs.

A quick eyeball of the projects list looks like about 100 projects: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html

So each project gets funded enough for 10% of a developer. That's not enough to provide infrastructure to commercial users satisfaction.

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Joker_vD 2 days ago | parent [-]

Depends on what, exactly, the developers are doing with them projects! If those are in the "maintenance mode" (no new features, just fixing bugs and making sure it still builds with newer toolchains/ecosystems), then this amount of humanpower may be quite reasonable.

	▲	whizzter 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's still a drop in the ocean, heard of that KISS-CAM CEO that got busted for cheating? His company literally seems to be built on selling hosted Apache Airflow services and just took in a series D round of 93 MUSD. Apache HTTPD still seems to run about 17% of all sites, plenty of those probably make money using the software. https://www.netcraft.com/blog/january-2025-web-server-survey Open source is open, so naturally people can use it but the ecosystem has also been at a breaking point for years and bad actors has caught the scent of that.
	▲	dlachausse 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The vast majority of ASF projects are in maintenance mode. This isn’t a bad thing, but compared to a project like the Linux kernel for example, Apache httpd is mature software that doesn’t require many full time developers to maintain.

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sshine 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> The attacks on OpenSSL maintainers ten years ago were disgusting

I didn't register the attacks, but I'm sure there were some when you say it.

I summarized the blame on that incident xkcd's wording:

"some random person has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003"

https://xkcd.com/2347/

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evantbyrne 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Developers can only be as good at their jobs as their environment allows them to be. Based on the commit log for all authors, my takeaway here is that this is a legacy software project that needs better test coverage and to establish standards around adding tests when merging in contributions.

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throwaway2037 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, crazy. Also, the bugfix does not include a test case.

	▲	dlachausse 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Feel free to contribute one. I’m sure the maintainers would welcome it… > If you want to participate in actively developing Apache please subscribe to the dev@httpd.apache.org mailing list as described at https://httpd.apache.org/lists.html#http-dev

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whatevaa 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are tests?

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Hilift 2 days ago | parent [-]

It is "CrowdTested".

	▲	oaiey 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You already have a registered trademark? Will use that ;)

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csmpltn 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Welcome to open source software, the "year of the linux desktop", etc...