Why reserving '-h' for help option?

[Explorer09]

The template seems to deliberately reserve -h flag for the predefined --help option. While I appreciate that some shell scripts do use -h for help option (for user convenience), but what's the rationale of imposing it in the template? My concern is that -h could be used for other things depending on application (one use that came to my mind is --no-dereference in utilities such as touch and chown), and applications should be able to let help text be invoked only via the long --help option.

Another problem I observed is when COMMANDLINE_OPTION_DISPLAY_HELP_SHORT is set to empty, then an empty argument string '' might trigger the help text display. What I expected is that it would disable the short option for help text and accept only the long option for help.