No idea, but it looks like you're not getting man-db anytime soon Given that man-db wants to also pull these: bsdmainutils bsdutils coreutils debianutils groff-base mktemp you could try simulating installation of each one individually, e.g. # apt-get -s install bsdmainutils # apt-get -s install bsdutils .. and see which one(s) cause the whole mess. Honestly, if all you want the man *database* (without the man program, etc.) I cannot imagine how the maintainer managed to massively fvck up the dependencies (but hey, this is debian). One option is to simply unpack the .deb and live with it..