So I did some more digging through the MiKTeX source code[1]. There's a couple of different Wolfgangs mentioned in comments scattered around the source, but I'm

So I did some more digging through the MiKTeX source code[1]. There's a couple of different Wolfgangs mentioned in comments scattered around the source, but I'm not sure which of them (if any) prompted this flag. I did find the following comment: Revision 3.6 1995/10/21 22:20:42 kempson Fixed numerous bugs, improved error reporting and added the --wolfgang option. So apparently it was a PhD from around 1995 or so. What's even more impressive is that their name got turned into a magic incantation: while looking at forum posts about this I found that a lot of people just said "always pass --wolfgang, it makes things better"! [1]: https://github.com/MiKTeX/miktex/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=wolfgang https://github.com/MiKTeX/miktex/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=wol...