In a recent groff change, the handling of the character used to mark command-line options on Unix systems sparked controversy within the Debian community. The issue stemmed from the use of different types of dashes in man pages, which can cause confusion and errors for users. The groff change exposed these glyph usage errors, leading to complaints and bug reports. Some argued for mapping all types of dashes to a single character, while others defended the current behavior. Ultimately, Debian decided to reinstate the remapping of the “-” character in its version of groff. This problem highlights the challenges of documentation writing, typographic correctness, and Unicode look-alike code points.
https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/