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!