Re: [tz] Doubts about a typo fix

[Russ Allbery]

Narrowing this down to the groff list since it doesn't really apply to the
other lists, but please cc me on replies since I'm not subscribed.

"G. Branden Robinson via tz" <tz@iana.org> writes:

> Most people won't see a difference because groff 1.22.4 (and earlier
> releases going back to, I think, 2009) the man(7) macro package remaps
> the hyphen to the minus sign on the 'utf8' output device.  This will be
> changing in groff 1.23 to improve consistency with man page rendering on
> typesetters.[1]  Workarounds are documented.[2]

Debian may have to override this locally again.  I remember the days
before 2009 when this was the case, and it caused no end of problems,
usually with cutting and pasting switches or code examples.  Sadly, a
large number of upstream man pages used - incorrectly.  (Even putting
aside the problem that, technically, you need \N'45' or some similar thing
because \- is supposed to be minus rather than the ASCII hyphen, as noted
in your second link.)

We tried clean up all the problems previously, but it was like bailing out
the ocean, and I think we stopped once groff changed its default mapping.

> mandoc maintainer Ingo Schwarze and I both recommend against performing
> string definitions, or interpolating strings, in man pages.

Pod::Man of course does tons of this.  I'm always open to alternatives,
but they're all there for a reason....

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>