On 2023-10-15 01:30 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > At 2023-10-14T20:51:27-0600, Antonio Russo wrote: > > Quick background: in the context of Unix usage as documented by > nroff/troff, the dash used at the shell prompt, in text editors, and in > programming language source code is a "minus sign". troff has an em > dash special character as well since the mid-1970s; groff adds an en > dash as well, and furthermore supports user definition of characters > providing access to any other sort of dash that comes down the Unicode > pike. (Not that doing so is a good idea in a man page; see below > regarding a "restricted dialect" of man(7).) > > > Now, depending on your email client and settings, the above will > > appear to be the ravings of an unhinged lunatic who wrote the same > > thing twice, or an unhinged lunatic who slammed their fists onto the > > keyboard. > > This issue does indeed have a history of provoking unhinged lunacy. > > Before we proceed, you might wish to be aware of > <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1041731> and its > proposed remedy.
OK. So I read all that, and learned a whole load of stuff I was quite happy not knowing about. However despite reading it all, and especially this bit: "Whenever I've maintained man pages in roff I tend to be precise in > the usage of - and \-, but TBH this has seemed like a lost battle," I was left not actually know what - and \- represent, nor which one I _should_ be using in my man pages. And that seems to be the one thing we should be telling the 'average maintainer'. I think you can consider me representative of the typical maintainer who's intereaction with *roff languages almost entirely takes the form: 'Oh bloody hell I really ought to write a man page for this because upstream is too youthful to have done so - now how the hell does roff/nroff/groff work again' (no I'm not sure which it is I'm actually using, nor how any of this machinery really works, nor where to look for good practice, so I mostly copy existing stuff and DDG for answers, which is less than ideal when it comes to details like this). So this message is mostly a reminder that most people have not been following along at all, so just referring people to bugs like this, which discuss the issue in some detail, is not sufficient for maintainers to stop doign unhelpful things. (Yes I realise I could look it up, but I get the impression that everyone involved in this discusssion assumes people know what '-' and '\-' are so if they are just told to 'use the right one' will do so, and I thought it worth pointing out that that's not correct). Info for your average maintainer needs to go one step back and say "use stringA in this circumstance and stringB in this circumstance. <explanation of what they represent>. The reason why it matters is: stuff about hyphen and minus being different and minus being used in commands and cut+pasting being important" Hope that's helpful. Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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