Hmm, as I have man-db on my N900 I never was so masochistic to try on N9...

But yesterday I tried and failed, more or less the same way.
I extracted with -x and also control files with -e.
Copied extracted etc usr var directories directly to /.
Ran pre/postinst with 'configure 2.5.1'.
And ran 'mandb'.
(installed also groff-base, but just as no other idea)

But output is still