hyphen-minus, was: docbook2mdoc-1.0.0 released

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Jan & Anthony,

Anthony J. Bentley wrote on Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 04:56:25PM -0600:
> Jan Stary writes:

>> BTW, is "Fl -option" the preferred way to handle --long-options?

Yes.

> I've seen "Fl -option" and "Fl Fl option" about equally.
> Personally I prefer Fl Fl,

We did that for some time, but generally stopped doing so because
even though the printed output looks correct, it is logically
misleading.  There is only a single option here, not two, and .Fl
without an argument means the special option "-", as it occurs for
example in lprm(1) and tset(1).

  http://mandoc.bsd.lv/mdoc/style/options.html

    (note that already recommends .Fl -option even though it was
     last updated more than two years ago)

> because in some groff outputs "Fl -option" prints
> the first and second - as visibly different characters.

Oh wow.  All the discussion we recently had about whether to
recommend "\-" or "-" as input for desired HYPHEN-MINUS output
was based on the assumption that groff contained, for the man(7)
and mdoc(7) macros, a mapping of '-' to \N'45'.  It does indeed
for UTF-8.  But for PostScript and HTML, '-' actually comes out
as a hyphen from groff, even for manual pages...

How could we possibly miss that after years of delimberation?
I'm so tired of this matter...

> Fl Fl also means that mandoc's tagging support lets me search
> for "option" instead of "-option", and that feels more natural to me.

That works either way:

   $ grep version `man -w openrsync`              
  .Op Fl -version
  .It Fl -version
  Print version and exit.
  protocol version is older than the local protocol version.
  is compatible with rsync protocol version 27
   $ man -k Fl=version | grep rsync               
  openrsync(1) - synchronise local and remote files
   $ man -k Fl~version | grep rsync 
  openrsync(1) - synchronise local and remote files

You would have to go out of your way to not make it work:

   $ man -k Fl~^version | grep rsync
   $ 

Yours,
  Ingo
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