Bug#785353: lintian: RfC: retiring hyphen-used-as-minus-sign
Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org> writes:
> Bastien ROUCARIES wrote:
>> Could we downgrade to pedantic ?
> I'd also rather downgrade than drop it. Maybe even tag it experimental.
I don't think tagging it as experimental is an appropriate use of
experimental, not that we've been great about this in the past. But
experimental checks should ideally be something that someone is working on
to either make better or toss. I think they're so that we can run a check
on the whole archive and see if it actually works without bothering people
with it.
If checks don't pan out in experimental, I think we should be tossing
them. I don't like the idea of permanently moving a check into
experimental. Anything in experimental should have some sort of exit
criteria for how it's going to become *not* experimental.
Pedantic would be the appropriate spot for this. However....
> Jakub Wilk wrote:
>> Yeah, these days even upstream groff renders both - and \- as
>> HYPHEN-MINUS.
> Then again, this sounds as if it's indeed obsolete. Actually I can
> imagine easily the semantic difference, but I've never noticed any
> different rendering. But then again I'd expect no difference with any
> rendering in text-mode and I never read man-pages in graphical tools.
...basically, historically, there was a difference between - and \-. But
I think absolutely everyone has given up on this, including groff
upstream, and at this point we're just poking random upstreams about
something that they don't care about and don't have any real defensible
reason to care about. Or carrying really tedious and hard-to-maintain
diffs.
I think we should just drop it.
However, copying Colin, as I think he should weigh in on this as man-db
maintainer and groff maintainer.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: