Bug#664471: false positive for hyphen-used-as-minus-sign
Iustin Pop <iustin@debian.org> writes:
> It seems to me that lintian falsely reports hyphen-used-as-minus-sign
> for the following line in the file:
> Use \f[C]--\ --help\f[] for a list.
> If the space ('\ ') is removed, the warning is no longer
> generated.
That would be a false negative when the space is not present.
I think the font change is causing Lintian to miss this, but those will be
turned into Unicode characters by default groff and should be escaped.
That should be written as:
Use \f[C]\-\-\ \-\-help\f[] for a list.
Basically, the literal "-" character, as typed on the keyboard so that you
could cut and paste it, is always written as "\-".
> I'm not familiar with the groff source language, but at least viewing
> the page through man shows regular minus signs, and not dashes.
That's because Debian applies a local override to the *roff macros to
force all hyphens to be US-ASCII. But we would really like to be able to
remove that override at some point, since hyphens produce nicer output and
we'd rather not continue to carry the divergence from upstream.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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