docbook2man uses hyphens instead of minus signs

Automatically imported from Debian bug report #208967 http://bugs.debian.org/208967

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2003 18:09:55 +0200
From: Eduard Bloch <email address hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <email address hidden>
Subject: docbook2man uses hyphens instead of minus signs

Package: docbook-utils
Version: 0.6.13-2
Severity: important

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.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux debian 2.4.23-pre2 #1 Mi Sep 3 16:09:39 CEST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8

Versions of packages docbook-utils depends on:
ii docbook-dsssl 1.78-4 modular DocBook DSSSL stylesheets,
ii jadetex 3.13-1 generator of printable output from
ii lynx 2.8.4.1b-5 Text-mode WWW Browser
ii perl 5.8.0-19 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction
ii sgmlspl 1.03ii-25 SGMLS-based example Perl script fo
ii sp 1.3.4-1.2.1-35 James Clark's SGML parsing tools

-- no debconf information

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2003 18:53:57 +0200
From: Christian Marillat <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: severity of 208967 is normal

severity 208967 normal

Message-ID: <20050818123125.GA8702@debian>
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 14:31:25 +0200
From: Eduard Bloch <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: WTF?

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.
--=20
Das Wort "WINDOWS" stammt aus einem alten Sioux-Dialekt und bedeutet:
"Wei=DFer Mann starrt durch Glasscheibe auf Sanduhr."

Need an independent assessment of the true severity of this bug...doesn't seem
major to me

Definitely not high-severity because nowadays groff is configured to render both
- and \- the same way anyhow.

(actually normal because it can result in incorrect line breaks sometimes)

Message-ID: <email address hidden>
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 23:50:15 +0100
From: Colin Watson <email address hidden>
To: Eduard Bloch <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>, <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: WTF?

severity 208967 normal
thanks

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 02:31:25PM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> 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?

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.)

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:57:51 +0000

Cheers,

--
Colin Watson [<email address hidden>]

Thank you for posting this bug.

Is this still an issue in Lucid?

Yes, this still seems to be present in Lucid's docbook2man package. Running lintian on a package made with docbook man pages shows me:

I: rtorrent: hyphen-used-as-minus-sign usr/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1.gz:383
I: rtorrent: hyphen-used-as-minus-sign usr/share/man/man1/rtorrent.1.gz:603

Marking as confirmed, no fix for Debian yet, so I assume it is still not fixed in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and higher. Thank you very much for reporting this bug.