Broken references in manual pages

[Roland Illig <roland.illig%gmx.de@localhost>]

Hi,

Out of curiosity, I ran the following commands on NetBSD-current/amd64:

cd /usr/share/man
printf '%s\n' */*.*
| xargs grep -n '^\.Xr ' \
| while read src topic section rest; do
	test -f "man$section/$topic.$section" \
	|| echo "${src%:*}: missing $topic $section"; \
done

This simple command returned 1958 broken references between the manual
pages.  This number is a rough estimage.  Some broken references are
missed, as some '.Xr' lines contain more than one reference.  Some
references point to section "3.", which does not exist.

I checked a few instances of the reported messages, which all resulted
in "man: no entry for %s in the manual".

Shouldn't there be an automatic check for these?  Running this check
after a "make distribution" should be fairly easy.

What about other obvious mistakes in manual pages?  I know there is
wizd, but if this task can be automated easily, what is preventing us
from doing that?

Roland