Re: problem with man?

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@sgk.tiac.net>]

I found 4 packages that generated problems with whatis.  Three of them were
fixed within a day of the time I reported them.  They are:  maildist.1
mailpatch.1, and maillist.1; all are part of the mailagent package.

I did not report another file that was causing problems, because, well,
no particular excuse.  That file---which is man2/ioctl_list.2---is very much 
out of date, and is also very much out of manpage format, so it struck me 
that more than a little surgery would be needed.  I "fixed" it by adding 
these lines just after the comment section at the top:

.TH IOCTL_LIST 2 
.SH NAME
ioctl_list \- type information for non-pointer args.
.SH SYNOPSIS

Then I ran 
    mandb -c
which created a new lookup database, and man and apropos seem to be working
fine now.

If any of that is actually any help to you, let me know and I'll file 
a real bug report.

Susan Kleinmann
sgk@sgk.tiac.net
> 
> For quite some time now, any man keyword search ends with:
> 
> apropos: warning: can't read the fallback whatis text database.
> apropos: /usr/X11/man/whatis: No such file or directory
> 
> It started a while back, and I assumed that it was a buggy package,
> and that it would go away when a newer one was released, but it's been
> a while (and many packages) and the problem remains.  It's not just
> one system either, it's happened to a couple of the machines I
> maintain.
> 
> Who generates the whatis file?
> 
> Thanks
> --
> Rob
>