Hyphens, minus, and dashes in Debian man pages
It is probably fair to say that most Linux users spend little time thinking about the troff typesetting program, despite that application's groundbreaking role in computing history. Troff (along with nroff) is still with us, though, even if they are called groff these days, and every now and then they make their presence known. A recent groff change created a bit of a tempest within the Debian community, and has effectively been reverted there. It all comes down to the question of what, exactly, is the character used to mark command-line options on Unix systems?
Last July, Sven Joachim filed a bug report regarding a change in groff, and in how it renders man pages for terminals in particular. A change to the handling of the character often referred to as "hyphen", "minus", or "dash" ("-") made many man pages rather harder to work with.