Comment # 4 on bug 1190190 from Thomas Schraitle

Just to to let you know a few details which could be important.

1. Different DocBook versions
Nowadays, DocBook has two major versions: 4 or 5. Among other changes, the most
prevalent difference is a namespace in version 5. This looks like this:

   <refentry xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" ...>

If you don't have this namespace it is DocBook 4 which usually looks like this:

   <!DOCTYPE refentry PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
     "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
   <refentry ...>


2. Different DocBook stylesheets
Furthermore, the DocBook project publishes also the DocBook stylesheets. These
are XSLT stylesheets which can transform the XML input into the most common
output formats (HTML, FO, or--in your case--manpage).

The tricky part is that these stylesheets comes in a non-ns and ns variant (ns
stands for namespace). Although the non-ns variant is made for DocBook 4 and
the ns variant for DocBook 5, it normally doesn't matter. However, I discovered
some strange effects when using the ns variant with DocBook 4 sources (or vice
versa).

To make a long story short: check which DocBook version you have and use the
right stylesheet for the job. For example, in case you still use DocBook 4, you
want to try the non-ns variant. Replace this path:

  /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh5/current/manpages/docbook.xsl

with this:

  /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/current/manpages/docbook.xsl

(without the "5" in nwalsh)

Hope that helps.