Re: [PATCH] findfs: (man) improve the markup, the layout, and the wording

Nuno Silva <[email protected]> Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:03:20 +0000
Newsgroups org.kernel.vger.util-linux
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 2026-02-28, Benno Schulenberg wrote:

> Mark NAME as a placeholder instead of a literal, and rename it to
> TAGNAME to make it clearer what "tag" in the description refers to.
>
> Indent the list of possible tags, to make it clearer where the
> description continues.
>
> Drop the angle brackets around placeholders -- those are used
> in --help output, but in man pages it is just italics.

My apologies if I'm missing some convention from util-linux itself, but:
from a quick check, it looks to me that italics is used for such
placeholders in IEEE 1003.1. Any chance this is or was a de facto
standard to denote placeholders? Or something done this way for
consistency (not that I've done a survey of how common this is)?

(Also see "Utility Operand" and "Utility Option with Option-Argument" in
the table at [1], at the end.)

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/frontmatter/typographics.html

> Also add a missing section header.
>
> Signed-off-by: Benno Schulenberg <[email protected]>
[...]

(diff snipped as what's above is IMHO sufficient context for my reply)
-- 
Nuno Silva