As long as I'm on the subject of "makewhatis" and man pages,
I guess i should point out that not all man-page-sources are
created equally.  In tryin out the hack (nroff ...blah) I suggested
in previous post, I discovered that perl manpages did not appear in
"whatis"; the reason for this can be seen by looking at the sed script
/usr/share/man/makewhatis.sed, which looks for the RE /^N^H^N^A^ etc /
(i.e. "overstruck NAME in col 0") to trigger its extrectaction of the
whatis info.  The perl man sources appear to have been diddled in some
way so that the "NAME" in them is made of characters overstruck not once,
but three times.  (Worn ribbon on the teletype???) The cure for this is
to 1) add a  | col -b | to the pipes in /usr/libexec/makewhatis, and 2)
Change the RE in /usr/share/man/makewhatis.sed to a simple /^NAME/

Dave