"up-to-date" vs. "up to date"

Hello git community,

This is about an issue of language style and punctuation, not anything functional. Apologies in advance if I've brought this to the wrong place.

There are a bunch of situations in which git will print a message like "Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'" or "Already up-to-date."

In many of these cases, including the two examples I just gave, "up to date" should not be hyphenated --- at least according to most (if not all) English-language style guides.

Here are a couple posts in support of that, which also explain when it should and should not be hyphenated: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/180611/do-i-keep-myself-up-to-date-or-up-to-date-on-something http://grammarist.com/usage/up-to-date/

And the Chromium community dealing with the same issue: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-reviews/edodON6G2oY

I thought about submitting a patch, but I started looking through the source code and found that "up-to-date" appears 61 times. So before I get into that I thought I would check with the community to see if this is something that's already been debated and decided.

Awaiting your thoughts, Jeff Manian