I don't manage with "nearly default" configure options.
man-db depends on groff, help2man,groff-base,info (texinfo),bsdmainutils
help2man depends on perl
bsdmainutils depends on debianutils
debianutils is in conflict with busybox

So, if I go on, I probably do have the manpages. But only the manpage, not any other command

Maybe that the options could be tweaked to change these dependencies. So it's not as easy as in scratchbox (which doesn't rely on busybox)