See subject. In most cases and ALWAYS in option lists, the manpages are
meant to use minus signs ('\-' in groff syntax). But docbook2man prints
hyphens instead ('-'). This is very nasty, especially in Unicode
environments (copy&paste inpossible).

The severity is high because docbook2man is THE REASON for many broken
manpages in Debian.

MfG,
Eduard.

severity 208967 grave
thanks

Christian, what about communicating with the bug reporters instead of
silently downgrading the bugs?

In fact this problems fscks the groff conversion in every Debian package
using Docbook sgml (from dh_make examples). How do your solution plans
look like? Do you have any? Do you need help?

Regards,
Eduard.

severity 208967 normal
thanks

Nowadays, as of five months before you sent this mail, Debian groff
renders both - and \- using the same ASCII character even when using the
utf8 device, so speaking as the groff maintainer I can see no
justification for this bug to be grave. While the distinction has some
typographical importance (docbook2man's current output will occasionally
result in incorrect line breaks) and is therefore still a bug, it is
otherwise visible only in troff output such as PostScript.

groff (1.18.1.1-7) unstable; urgency=low

  * Too many fonts are missing the Unicode HYPHEN character, so I give up.
    Render "-" as HYPHEN-MINUS (ASCII 0x2D) by default. (Of course, manual
    pages using "-" when they should be using "\-" should still be fixed.)

Hi,

Please find attached the debdiff patch that should solve both #208967
and #628751.

In short:  Current version of docbook2man's hyphen rendering makes
lintian complain about "hyphen-used-as-minus-sign". This patch renders
`-' as `\-' and `\-' as `\\\-', so we should have a correct output and
lintian not complaining again.

This should solve a big amount of the current
"hyphen-used-as-minus-sign" reports.

I wrote it as an NMU but I'd rather have it uploaded and integrated by
official maintainers.

Tested on module-init-tools (the oldstable version which uses sgml)
and it seems fine to me.
Also tested on gnome-shell-pomodoro I am currently using sgml man
pages with and it also works great!

Best,
Joseph

Hi,

Please find attached the debdiff patch that should solve both #208967
and #628751.

In short:  Current version of docbook2man's hyphen rendering makes
lintian complain about "hyphen-used-as-minus-sign". This patch renders
`-' as `\-' and `\-' as `\\\-', so we should have a correct output and
lintian not complaining again.

This should solve a big amount of the current
"hyphen-used-as-minus-sign" reports.

I wrote it as an NMU but I'd rather have it uploaded and integrated by
official maintainers.

Tested on module-init-tools (the oldstable version which uses sgml)
and it seems fine to me.
Also tested on gnome-shell-pomodoro I am currently using sgml man
pages with and it also works great!

Best,
Joseph

Hi!

Here's a ping, reminding that this bug still affects Debian Trixie
(currently unstable).  I have uncommented the workaround in my
/etc/groff/man.local, because as maintainer of the Linux man-pages, I do
want to be able to check if there are problems in my manual pages.  As a
consequence, I can't search (/) for options and things that contain '-'
in manual pages that have this bug.

There's a patch, so what else do we need to fix the bug?  Can the patch
be offered to upstream, please?

Thanks,
Alex