Hi! [ CCed Russ for the pod2man side of this. ]
On Mon, 2023-08-14 at 14:18:51 +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote: > I'm marking this important, and am tempted to raise it to serious... > > The problem at stake is that we have already a hard time making > newcomers read manpages. If they can't even trust copying/pasting lines > from them, they will just definitely turn away, and we'll aggravate the > schism between us olders and newcomers. Trust me from 20-year teaching > experience... This is not just copy&pasting, searching in formatted man pages from within a pager or with grep for example does not work any more (well you can always use «.» but that's rather unintuitive). > Yes, we'd ideally want to fix all manpages to have everything set > alright. But we have to do that before the release. And if that's not > complete, release with the > > . char - \- > > workaround. 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, more so since at least lintian stopped emitting tags for it. And another problem which I think it's going to be very hard to fix is with man page generators from other formats, such as pod2man, where it currently has heuristics to determine when to use - or \-, but it does not currently has a way to accurately do this always. > As in: maybe we can leave the symptom open until the freeze period, so > that developers notice the issue and fix their bugs, and on the freeze > period, introduce the workaround so that end users of the eventual > released distribution don't get affected while we are still fixing the > bugs. While in an ideal world that might be good, I'm not sure this is worth the pain, and fixing this (if deemed necessary) out of linting tags seems like a better plan? Thanks, Guillem
