Solaris man uses a manual page index file called "windex" in place of the old "whatis" file. You can build this index with
catman -w -M <man-page-directory>
But, in 2.1, this will result in numerous "line too long" messages and a bogus windex file in /usr/share/man, and a core dump in /usr/openwin/man. (In 2.2, catman works in /usr/share/man, but says "line too long" in /usr/openwin/man). To add injury to insult, "man" normally won't show you a man page if it can't find the windex entry, even though the man page exists.
Makewhatis, or better, getNAME, still can't deal with all manual pages from the net.
Solaris 8 man will look for the manual page the hard way if it cannot find it in an existing "windex" file.
Starting with Solaris 7 manual pages are being converted to SGML format; the formatting is now a lot slower as there's an extra sgml2roff step in between.
But wait, there's more! To see the read(2) man page, you can't just type "man 2 read" anymore - it has to be "man -s 2 read". Or, alias man to this little script:
#!/bin/sh if [ $# -gt 1 -a "$1" -gt "0" ]; then /bin/man -F -s $* else /bin/man -F $* fi