Hi,
thanks for your PR. I think the current code is valid. It looks like the double '%' character does some escaping.

current code:

onosek@f53286b30142:/(master)$ PYTHONPATH=/src/rpkg fedpkg help | grep verify-files | tail -n 1
verify-files        Locally verify %files section

your suggestion:

onosek@f53286b30142:/(master)$ PYTHONPATH=/src/rpkg fedpkg help | grep verify-files
Could not execute print_help: must be real number, not dict

Sorry, I should have been clearer what the problem is. The man page for fedpkg, as shipped by Fedora, contains the double %s:

[…]
COMMAND OVERVIEW
[…]
       fedpkg verify-files [-h] [--builddir BUILDDIR] [--buildrootdir BUILDROOTDIR] [--arch ARCH] [--define DEFINE] ...
              Locally verify %%files section
[…]

Glancing at the code, pyrpkg/man_gen.py appears to invoke argparse's format_help() and I'm not sure whether that call should return a string with the expanded text (i. e., %% transformed to %) and if it does. So I'll close the PR as it is wrong, and I open a new issue.