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From: "Anthony J. Bentley" <anthony@anjbe.name>
To: Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>
Cc: Jan Stary <hans@stare.cz>, discuss@mandoc.bsd.lv
Subject: Re: hyphen-minus, was: docbook2mdoc-1.0.0 released
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2019 10:32:32 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <7061.1555864352@desktop.ajb.soy> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190421123257.GA31325@athene.usta.de>

Hi Ingo,

Ingo Schwarze writes:
> 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.

I remember that conclusion, but I simply don't agree with the
prescriptivism in this particular case.

> 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).

"Fl abcd" could mean an option called "abcd" as in xterm(1) or "-a -b
-c -d" as in normal getopt usage. I don't see how "Fl Fl may be
considered to collapse into a single option" is inherently worse than
that, especially as the pattern is seen in real-world manpages.

> > 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...

I am quite sure I've mentioned this before in our voluminous discussion
on this subject... hopefully we can avoid re-litigating it, since I hate
the topic as much as you do!

> > 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
>    $ 

Try "man openrsync", then ":tversion". That's what I was referring to.

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley
--
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  reply	other threads:[~2019-04-21 16:32 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-04-17 19:24 Ingo Schwarze
2019-04-20 19:03 ` Jan Stary
2019-04-20 22:56   ` Anthony J. Bentley
2019-04-21 12:32     ` hyphen-minus, was: " Ingo Schwarze
2019-04-21 16:32       ` Anthony J. Bentley [this message]
2019-04-21 11:26   ` Stephen Gregoratto
2019-04-25 17:02     ` Ingo Schwarze
2019-04-21 15:29   ` Ingo Schwarze

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