Enhancing pty driver to act like a serial port?

[Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>]

The question of emulating a serial port in user-space has come
up a number of times in various contexts during the past few
years.  

The current pty driver isn't really sufficient when the
application actually expects to be connected to a physical
serial port: you can't set parity or word length, and the modem
control/status ioctl() calls fail.

That means that many applications just won't run when told to
use a pty instead of a normal serial port.

If one were to enhance the pty driver to support the same
operations as a serial port, would the "powers that be" be
amenable to accepting such changes into the main pty driver
sources?

Or is this even the right place to discuss the pty driver?

-- 
Grant