The oversight is that they developed and tested it on Linux, created the file on Linux as well, but used it on Solaris, using an operating system tool to enter the password that had different behaviour on Solaris (stripping anything beyond 8 characters in length because... nobody needs long passwords, right?).
It still happens today though, and subtle differences between computers or e.g. CPU architectures can and will still occur. It's really difficult or cost prohibitive to set up a DTAP or similar where every step is production-like; I can imagine it's similarly complex on modern day distributed systems / microservices.
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The oversight is that they developed and tested it on Linux, created the file on Linux as well, but used it on Solaris, using an operating system tool to enter the password that had different behaviour on Solaris (stripping anything beyond 8 characters in length because... nobody needs long passwords, right?).
It still happens today though, and subtle differences between computers or e.g. CPU architectures can and will still occur. It's really difficult or cost prohibitive to set up a DTAP or similar where every step is production-like; I can imagine it's similarly complex on modern day distributed systems / microservices.