The basic argument is that, while applications should mark most of its file descriptors with O_CLOEXEC, it may legitimately not want to set that flag when it wants to pass the fd to child processes. The application cannot reliably predict when glibc will exec programs like pt_chown, so it cannot know when it needs to set O_CLOEXEC See bug #528134 for more background
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 12 development cycle. Changing version to '12'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
I have changed the upstream code. But grantpt is really a special case because it is transparent that pt_chown is used at all. If there are other fork problems the arguments here don't apply. The patch can be backported.
glibc-2.11-4 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 12. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/glibc-2.11-4
glibc-2.11-4 has been pushed to the Fedora 12 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update glibc'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F12/FEDORA-2009-12470
glibc-2.11.1-1 has been pushed to the Fedora 12 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update glibc'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F12/FEDORA-2009-12470
glibc-2.11.1-1 has been pushed to the Fedora 12 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.