OK. I found out why apropos does not work for the PHP manpages.
apropos is dependent on parsing the formatted manpages to create the whatis database for each manpage set, as discussed in
mandb
Where we see:
Quote:
DIAGNOSTICS
The following warning messages can be emitted during database building.
<filename>: whatis parse for page(sec) failed
An attempt to extract whatis line(s) from the given <filename>
failed. This is usually due to a poorly written manual page,
but if many such messages are emitted it is likely that the sys-
tem contains non-standard manual pages which are incompatible
with the man-db whatis parser. See the WHATIS PARSING section
in lexgrog(1) for more information.
So, I used
lexgrog on the PHP manpages and got the parse error; and when I examined the PHP manpages files, it's easy to see the pages are very poorly formatted (compared to "standard" manpages for linux and osx) and would require a lot of reformatting to get the parser to work so
whatis would work, etc.
Hahaha... if anyone cares to reformat over 10,000 PHP pages so the
lexgrog parser works on the PHP manpages, please raise your hand... otherwise, well will accept the fact that the PHP manpages will not be including in our recursive apropos (whatis) search.