[xml/sgml-pkgs] Bug#729059: hyphens / minus signs in xref tags

[Mike Gabriel]

Package: xmlto
Severity: minor

Hi,

today I have encountered a weird (and minor) bug when preparing a new freerdp upload.

The freerdp package uses xmlto to generate its man page out of an XML template [1].

This very man page ends up with one hyphen still being a minus sign (reported by lintian).
This means that there is an unescaped "-" in the man page source code.

Normally xmlto handles minus-signs / hyphens pretty well. The issue only occurs at _one_
position.

I figured out that this expression

  """
  <varlistentry id="AlternateShell">
        <term>-s <replaceable class="parameter">shell</replaceable></term>
        <listitem>
          <para>
            SomeText
          </para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

  [...]
  SomeText (<xref linkend="AlternateShell"/>) MoreText
  [...]
  """

ends up with a minus sign as hyphen in the man page (the xref uses the content of the <term> tag and that
"-s" is placed as "-s" on the man page.

However, when I use a slightly changed XML code for the xref link...

  """
  [...]
  SomeText ( <xref linkend="AlternateShell"/>) MoreText
  [...]
           ^^^ NOTE THE INSERTED SPACE HERE
  """

then the generated man page looks ok, the "-s" gets placed as "\-s" on the man page and the 
no minus-sign-as-hyphen issue is not reported by lintian anymore.

Maybe someone has a clue, how this can be amended.

Greets,
Mike

 

  """
 System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash