On Mon, 24 Feb 2020, Matthew Wilcox [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 01:08:13PM -0800, Randy Dunlap wrote:

quoted

Not trying to be contrary, but I would prefer to keep .rst files as much
ASCII as possible.

I don't think anybody is arguing otherwise.  The question is whether
minusminus should be left as a pair of minus signs or whether it should
be converted into an en-dash.

FWIW I think a pair of minus signs is never completely wrong in the
output (even when the semantics is en-dash and the conversion is
desirable) but occasionally converting a pair of minus signs to en-dash
is incorrect. Thus retaining the "smart" conversion requires we use some
form of escaping when we don't want double minus to be converted to
en-dash. I'd lean towards "smartquotes = False".

It'll still possible to add Unicode en-dash directly in the .rst if
people really want that.

BR,
Jani.

-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center