Ingo Schwarze wrote:
Until somebody shows me a specific list of roff implementations that do so, i challenge that statement as urban legend, and the advice to use \- for flags as cargo cult programming.
The reason lintian complains about this is that Debian had problems with - rendering as a unicode hyphen in their groff at one time[1]. As far as I can tell this no longer applies to current groff (which does indeed weaken the rationale here).
Can you tell me who the author and who the maintainer of that tool is? I'd like to question them about the reasons for their recommendation, if possible.
lintian is maintained by a team who can be contacted at mailto:[email protected].
...however, digging further, they also don't care about this anymore[2]. In this light I'm sorry to have wasted everybody's time with this patch.
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200303/msg01481.html
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=785353
