Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16.
Summary
The article documents a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16, tracing it to a brittle middle-ellipsis text-fit loop and a Newton-like iteration that oscillates between two truncation points. It presents a defensive fix with iteration caps and input clamps, plus a patch against e16 1.0.30, and discusses broader themes about software stability, maintenance of legacy code, and supply-chain considerations. The piece serves as a practical case study in debugging and patching low-level UI rendering in a long-lived open-source project.