2) For situations in which the luxury of a custom USB ID is not
available, e.g., a situation where the device that does not tolerate
automatic DTR/RTS assertion on open is a physical RS-232 device that
can be connected to "any" serial port, the new sysfs attribute comes
to the rescue.
Johan's patch comments say that the new flag can also be brought out
to termios in the future, similarly to HUPCL,
but I question the
usefulness of doing so, as it is a chicken and egg problem: one needs
to open the tty device in order to do termios ioctls on it, and if
that initial open triggers DTR/RTS hardware actions, then the end user
is still screwed. If Johan or someone else can see a potential use
case for manipulating this new flag via termios (as opposed to sysfs
or USB-ID-based driver quirks), perhaps you could elaborate on it?