Resolving a conflict between manpages-dev and libbsd-dev

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

I use xmonad, which needs ghc.

On my Debian 9/stretch machine, the manpages-dev package is declared to break libbsd-dev, which ghc depends on. So in practice, one must choose between xmonad and manpages-dev, which has annoyed me for a long time.

Today I tracked down a related Debian bug report and happened to notice that my libbsd-dev 0.8.3 was just one minor revision too old to avoid the conflict declared by manpages-dev 4.10-2:

$ apt-cache show manpages-dev|grep Breaks
Breaks: libbsd-dev (<< 0.8.4-1), manpages (<< 4.13-3)

I also noticed that libbsd-dev 0.9.1-1 packages were available in unstable/sid, and followed the instructions to create a backport of the package to stretch.

$ dget -x http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/libb/libbsd/libbsd_0.9.1-1.dsc
$ cd libbsd-0.9.1
$ sudo mk-build-deps --install --remove
$ dch --local ~bpo9+ --distribution stretch-backports \
    "Rebuild for stretch-backports."
$ dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

I installed the updated libbsd0 and libbsd-dev packages, and was then able to install manpages-dev for the first time in… several months, at least.

I have manpages again!