Backport /dev/pts to older branches?

Backport /dev/pts to older branches?

[Aurelien Jarno]

Dear all,

I would be interested in backporting the following change to Debian
Bullseye package:

commit 27fe5f2e67a0e4cc0526b1b32b55f8e519075edb
Author: Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
Date:   Wed Oct 7 14:55:04 2020 +0200

    Linux: Require properly configured /dev/pts for PTYs

    Current systems do not have BSD terminals, so the fallback code in
    posix_openpt/getpt does not do anything.  Also remove the file system
    check for /dev/pts.  Current systems always have a devpts file system
    mounted there if /dev/ptmx exists.

    grantpt is now essentially a no-op.  It only verifies that the
    argument is a ptmx-descriptor.  Therefore, this change indirectly
    addresses bug 24941.

    Reviewed-by: Adhemerval Zanella <adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org>

This fixes bz#24941, which seems to affects ansible users. I wonder if I
should backport it in the upstream stable release branch instead. This
is trivial to backport, but on some rare systems, this might require some
changes to get /dev/pts working.

Any thought about that?

Thanks
Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien@aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net

Re: Backport /dev/pts to older branches?

[Florian Weimer]

* Aurelien Jarno:

> I would be interested in backporting the following change to Debian
> Bullseye package:
>
> commit 27fe5f2e67a0e4cc0526b1b32b55f8e519075edb
> Author: Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
> Date:   Wed Oct 7 14:55:04 2020 +0200
>
>     Linux: Require properly configured /dev/pts for PTYs
>
>     Current systems do not have BSD terminals, so the fallback code in
>     posix_openpt/getpt does not do anything.  Also remove the file system
>     check for /dev/pts.  Current systems always have a devpts file system
>     mounted there if /dev/ptmx exists.
>
>     grantpt is now essentially a no-op.  It only verifies that the
>     argument is a ptmx-descriptor.  Therefore, this change indirectly
>     addresses bug 24941.
>
>     Reviewed-by: Adhemerval Zanella <adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org>
>
> This fixes bz#24941, which seems to affects ansible users. I wonder if I
> should backport it in the upstream stable release branch instead. This
> is trivial to backport, but on some rare systems, this might require some
> changes to get /dev/pts working.

We haven't backported it to our downstream 2.28-based glibc (or even
earlier), but maybe we should.  Not sure why our users aren't getting
hit by this regularly.

Doing the backport upstream should be okay (along with the NEWS update).

Thanks,
Florian