Bug#548844: lintian: hyphen-used-as-minus-sign generating false positives?

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.2.17
Severity: normal

Dear Lintian maintainers,

     I have just checked at manual pages that triggers
hyphen-used-as-minus-sign informational reports, like samtools(1) for
instance, and I did not experience any problem in searching for the
minus sign. I wonder if hyphen-used-as-minus-sign is not massively
triggering false positives, in the sense that not backslashing minus
signs do not create problems for the user.

I have seen problems for long options where two minus signs were
converted in en hyphens, so the test still has some uses, but
shouldn't be made much more conservative?

Have a nice day,

-- Charles Plessy, Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils              2.19.51.20090723-1 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii  diffstat              1.47-1             produces graph of changes introduc
ii  dpkg-dev              1.15.3.1           Debian package development tools
ii  file                  5.03-1             Determines file type using "magic"
ii  gettext               0.17-6             GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  intltool-debian       0.35.0+20060710.1  Help i18n of RFC822 compliant conf
ii  libapt-pkg-perl       0.1.23             Perl interface to libapt-pkg
ii  libclass-accessor-per 0.33-1             Automated accessor generator
ii  libipc-run-perl       0.84-1             Perl module for running processes
ii  libparse-debianchange 1.1.1-2            parse Debian changelogs and output
ii  libtimedate-perl      1.1600-9           Time and date functions for Perl
ii  liburi-perl           1.37+dfsg-1        Manipulates and accesses URI strin
ii  man-db                2.5.5-3            on-line manual pager
ii  perl [libdigest-sha-p 5.10.1-2           Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

lintian recommends no packages.

Versions of packages lintian suggests:
pn  binutils-multiarch            <none>     (no description available)
pn  libtext-template-perl         <none>     (no description available)
ii  man-db                        2.5.5-3    on-line manual pager

-- no debconf information