Emacs inventing system documentation

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>]

I'm using Emacs 21.3.1, and have noticed that from time to time, when I
use M-x man foo RET to get a man page, the man page is displayed along
with a message "foo man page made up". I don't want Emacs inventing man
pages! I'd rather it just displayed the man page I have installed, or gave
an error if it didn't exist.

I must admit that up to now I haven't noticed any differences between the
pages made up by Emacs and those I get from using the "man" command, but I
haven't checked the details. What if Emacs guesses wrongly about some
arcane corner of bash variable expansion? I could end up wasting hours
trying to track down a bug in a script (and even perhaps waste developers'
time by mistakenly reporting a bug in bash) when the real problem is
Emacs's unwilligness or inability to just look at the real man pages.

Is this just a configuration problem? I think I have my MANPATH and so-on
correctly set up. Looking through apropos I notice:

Man-default-man-entry
  Function: Make a guess at a default manual entry.

I'm guessing this function is being run when it shouldn't be.

-- 
http://www.mupsych.org/~rrt/ | impossible, a.  worth doing