On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 11:08:15AM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:

quoted

On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 23:22:27 +0100
Jonathan Neuschäfer [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Without double-backticks, Sphinx wrongly turns "--version" into
"–version" with a Unicode EN DASH (U+2013), that is visually easy to
confuse with a single ASCII dash.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Neuschäfer <j.neuschaefer@gmx.net>

This certainly seems worth addressing.  But I would *really* rather find
a way to tell Sphinx not to do that rather than making all of these
tweaks - which we will certainly find ourselves having to do over and
over again.  I can try to look into that in a bit, but if somebody were
to beat me to it ... :)

This seems to do the trick:

diff --git a/Documentation/conf.py b/Documentation/conf.py
index 3c7bdf4cd31f..8f2a7ae95184 100644
--- a/Documentation/conf.py
+++ b/Documentation/conf.py

@@ -587,6 +587,9 @@ pdf_documents = [
 kerneldoc_bin = '../scripts/kernel-doc'
 kerneldoc_srctree = '..'

+# Render -- as two dashes
+smartquotes = False