Re: whatis parse failed?

[Denis Barbier <barbier@imacs.polytechnique.fr>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 01:54:16AM -0300, Nicolás Lichtmaier wrote:
> > >> Does anyone know the various reasons that the whatis parse from man-db
> > >> would fail?
> > >
> > > Attach the relevant pieces of the manpage here...
> > 
> > I don't want to know for a specific manpage.  I want to write a test to
> > see if it will fail.  I don't want to run mandb to do it.  I looked in
> > the source to man-db but after 15 minutes I didn't see it and I didn't
> > have much time to play with it.  I'd like to do this robustly but it's
> > not a requirement.  :)
> 
>  Well.. I'd say that is a bug that something like this isn't specifically
> defined...
> 
>  You can find a definition in man(7):
> 
> .SH NAME
> chess \- the game of chess
> 
>  I would add to this that there can be several lines, documenting diferent
> things.

Hi Nicolás,
i asked a similar question to debian-mentors few days ago, but i was not
clear enough and did not get relevant answers. I am the new WML
maintainer, which contains some text files as manpages. These text files
are manified by inserting header, e.g. the one below. This worked for a
long time, but i now get the whatis error that Darren is reporting.
Could you tell me what to do to have a nice manpage?  I may add .SH NAME,
but are there other requirements?

   .TH WML_BAREBONE 7 "21 July 1996" "WML" "Website META Language"
   .ad r
   .na
   .ss 12 0
   .in 0
   .nh
   .nf

Thanks
Denis