Bug#602192: Ignore hyphens in mdoc .Bd -literal blocks
Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net> writes:
> Thanks for maintaining a wonderful Debian development tool!
> While packaging NetBSD's new netpgp tool (ITP #599753), I found that
> Lintian is IMHO being a bit too strict in looking for hyphens in mdoc
> manual pages. What do you think of the attached patch to skip ".Bd
> -literal" blocks in the hyphens search?
I believe Lintian is correct and the man page is wrong, although I'm not
positive. But I looked through the source of the .Bd macro in the doc
tmac macro set, and I don't see any indication that it changes the default
translation of the - character in groff to an ASCII hyphen instead of a
Unicode hyphen. I also see that when groff was switched to support
Unicode output correctly, groff's own documentation that used .Bd was
changed to escape hyphens inside .Bd -literal blocks. See:
http://www.mail-archive.com/groff-commit@gnu.org/msg00539.html
and note, for example, this fragment:
@@ -1202,7 +1202,7 @@
If this is not desirable,
.
.Bd -literal -offset indent
-\&.An -nosplit
+\&.An \-nosplit
.Ed
.Pp
.
Given that, I believe those hyphens really do need to be escaped, even
inside .Bd -literal, and Lintian is correctly warning about a bug in those
manual pages.
But if you have information indicating otherwise, please do let us know!
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: