On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 04:53:19PM +0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Not really.  In the POSIX sense, options are indeed options while
> primaries are arguments.  That has implications, for example that
> all options must precede all primaries.
Fair point.

> I don't feel very strongly about that, but i think .Cm does make
> slightly more sense for primaries than .Fl (and .Ic is probably
> acceptable, too, even though .Cm might be better because these are
> command line arguments, not stand-alone commands).
It does, however because the resulting effect is usually the same, I see
no problem in using `Fl' for primaries.

> I think that is reasonable, yes.  I think it makes sense to consider
> tags as words, i.e. strings that usually consist of letters and may
> sometimes contain digits, but never contain whitespace and usually
> do not start with punctuation characters.  I'm not sure this rule of
> thumb can be made very strict, but i think it is possible to polish
> this by handling a small number of common cases.  For example,
> automatic tagging in man(7) already discards leading whitespace, 
> some escape sequences, and leading dashes from tags.  Automatic
> tagging in mdoc(7) already discards leading zero-width spaces
> and leading backslashes.  I think it would make sense to also
> skip leading dashes here, see the patch below.
> 
> Do you agree with that?
Yes, I very much do.  Given the fact man(7) already works that way,
I'm happy to see mdoc(7) follow;  it seems like the right approach, my
attempt seems more of a workaround for special cases like find(1).

OK kn

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