Bug#284662: lintian: spurious manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry warnings when first line is a comment

["Steinar H. Gunderson" <sgunderson@bigfoot.com>]

Package: lintian
Version: 1.23.3
Severity: normal

One of my packages, pvm, contains several manpages of the form

  .\" $Id: pvmd.1,v 1.1 1996/09/23 21:50:26 pvmsrc Exp $
  .so man1/pvmd3.1

This triggers a flurry of lintian warnings (one for each man page) of
the form

  W: pvm-dev: manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry usr/share/man/man3/pvmfsetcontext.3.gz
  W: pvm-dev: manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry usr/share/man/man3/pvmfupkmesg.3.gz
  W: pvm-dev: manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry usr/share/man/man3/pvm_pkmesgbody.3.gz
  W: pvm-dev: manpage-has-bad-whatis-entry usr/share/man/man3/pvmfpack.3.gz

To me, it looks like this is because lintian only looks at the first
line to check for ".so". A reasonable workaround would probably simply
be skipping the first line if it is a comment, and check the second
line instead.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8.1
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils                      2.15-5     The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii  diffstat                      1.35-1     produces graph of changes introduc
ii  file                          4.10-3     Determines file type using "magic"
ii  gettext                       0.14.1-6   GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  man-db                        2.4.2-19   The on-line manual pager
ii  perl [libdigest-md5-perl]     5.8.4-4    Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

-- no debconf information