Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/

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?