[$] Hyphens, minus, and dashes in Debian man pages

It is probably fair to say that most Linux users spend little time thinkingabout the troff typesetting program, despite that application'sgroundbreaking role in computing history. Troff (along with nroff) isstill with us, though, even if they are called groff these days, and everynow and then they make their presence known. A recent groff change createda bit of a tempest within the Debian community, and has effectively beenreverted there. It all comes down to the question of what, exactly, is thecharacter used to mark command-line options on Unix systems?