docs: submitting-patches - change non-ascii character to ascii

From: Frank Rowand <[email protected]>

Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst contains a non-ascii character. Change it to the ascii equivalent.

---
 Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

index 3e10719fee35..733478ade91b 100644
@@ -413,7 +413,7 @@ e-mail discussions.
 
 
 
-11) Sign your work — the Developer's Certificate of Origin
+11) Sign your work - the Developer's Certificate of Origin
 ----------------------------------------------------------
 
 To improve tracking of who did what, especially with patches that can

Frank Rowand <[email protected]>

You should know better than to tell somebody like me that a hyphen and an m-dash are equivalent! :)

I don't have any real objection to this change, but I am curious: is the m-dash creating a problem somewhere? We have plenty of non-ASCII characters in Documentation/ and beyond, why change this one? Or to put it another way, do you think we should have an ASCII-only policy for documentation files?

Thanks,

jon

OK, so they aren't totally equivalent, but close enough. :) Should I have said analog instead of equivalent? And would you prefer '--' to '-'?

Ascii is a lowest common denominator. I can view and manipulate the file with any common text editor and common text utilities (eg, cat, grep, etc) on pretty much any Linux system that I walk up to. I don't need to go to any effort to try to figure out what a non-ascii character is (which is exactly what prompted my patch -- I wanted to know what the character my patch modifies is).

Yes, I can change my terminal emulator character encoding to UTF-8, and change my LANG to en_US.UTF-8. And now vi and cat show the correct m-dash character. But then how do I grep for m-dash in files? Google tells me I might be able to <ctrl> + <shift> + u hex_value_of_mdash to enter an mdash, but I sure don't know what the hex value of mdash is. Plus I need to be observant enough to notice that the string I am grepping for contains an m-dash instead of a dash. And why should I assume "en_US" as the prefix to my UTF-8 LANG?

To answer your second question, I would _prefer_ ASCII-only except for cases where being limited to ASCII is restricting the ability to convey information (properly).

I would reverse your question, and ask what is the added value of non-ascii characters __in cases similar to this one__, that justifies the negative impact? (Please don't answer what the added value is in cases that are not similar to this one. I know the answer to that question is different.)