Bug#785353: lintian: RfC: retiring hyphen-used-as-minus-sign

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Control: tags -1 pending

On 2015-05-16 03:21, Russ Allbery wrote:
> [...]
> 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.
> 

Hi,

Given Colin did not seem to have any remarks to this, I have decided to
commit the change.

Thanks,
~Niels