The 'whatis' utility from man-db 2.9.0 doesn't work for me. This includes both my user profile and 'guix environment's. 'apropos' works, so the man database is present and working.
$ guix environment --pure --ad-hoc man-db man-pages [env] $ apropos memcpy memcpy (3) - copy memory area wmemcpy (3) - copy an array of wide-characters [env] $ whatis memcpy memcpy: nothing appropriate. Regards, Jakub Kądziołka