Hello Ernst,

  EdT> You will need to 'manage' the link at the application
     > level if you don't use DTR/DSR and CD. AFAIK, getty
     > looks for DSR/CD activity before giving you a login
     > prompt. You can safely discard CD and wire that to
     > DSR for a terminal.
     >
     > Another side effect of not having DTR/DSR and CD is
     > that if you power cycle the 'terminal' or otherwise
     > break and make the link there is no hardware
     > signalling to tell the NetBSD host to terminate and
     > spawn another login. From a user experience it means
     > that they never logged out - however the data on the
     > screen is lost so they have to have some method of
     > forcing a redraw or they'll enter data at a unknown
     > cursor position.

Thanks, those sound like good reasons to keep the DTR - DSR
link.

  EdT> In my implentations I found it preferable to live
     > with XON/XOFF and DTR than RTS/CTS and no link status
     > control. But that would depend on the speeds that you
     > are driving, XON/XOFF is still acceptable up to 38k4
     > baud.

I was really surprised to learn that Richard Stallman had
used Ctrl+S and Ctrl+Q key bindings in his Emacs program.
Although I don't use Emacs, I've become wary of depending
on software flow control because other programmers might
have done the same thing.  It was a concern at the time
since I was looking at some primitive radio modems that
only passed the state of the data lines, not RTS & CTS.

Regards,
  - Andy Ball