pedantry: is there a standard for what should be in the SYNOPSIS?

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>]

  following up on an earlier question of mine, is there a standard for
what options should be listed in either the SYNOPSIS or the
DESCRIPTION sections of a man page? i ask since i'm seeing some
definite inconsistency.

  in addition to the patch i submitted earlier, here are some other
examples.

  "man git-clone", the SYNOPSIS says nothing about options "--verbose"
or "-v", even though "git clone" supports those options and they're
mentioned further down that man page.

  on that same man page, there are a number of options that have two
supported forms (eg., "-l" and "--local"), but the SYNOPSIS shows only
the short form, while many other man pages show both (for another
example of this, see "man git-clean", which shows only the short
forms).

  also, regarding what seems to be a standard for some options, it
seems that many commands support both options "--verbose" and "-v" to
mean verbose operation (as long as "-v" isn't reserved for some other
option for that command, which occasionally happens). in cases where
"-v" is not being used, is there a reason to not just add it as an
equivalent to "--verbose"?

  the same thing could be said with respect to "-n" (as long as it's
available) always being the short form of "--dry-run". and so on, and
so on.

  oh, and i'm still wondering why some commands feel the need to
explain the function of "--", when that's the sort of thing that more
properly belongs in "man gitcli".

  thoughts?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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