option sort order in usage/man pages/documentation

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:25:21AM -0400, Allan Jude wrote:
> On 2018-08-30 03:50, Yuri Pankov wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm working on some man page updates, and, thinking about consistency,
> > been wondering if there's any policy set on the order of options that
> > one should use in usage messages/man pages/other documentation, i.e. is
> > it 'ABCabc', 'AaBbCc', or 'aAbBcC' (or anything else really, I hope
> > 'unsorted' isn't possible answer here).
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> 
> It has definitely been policy to sort them alphabetically, but I don't
> know that that much attention has ever been paid to sorting upper and
> lower case characters.
> 
> ABCabc is right out, but I don't know what the right answer is between
> the other two. I would say humans sort lowercase first, but by ASCII the
> uppercase is first.

POSIX locale collation behavior is probably going to be the default winner
in this question.

Though I think there are some cases where it is better to group related
options than to globally do everything alphabetically.

-Ben
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