Thank you, that helped a lot. I downloaded and installed the .debs manually, and the new sticking point became that this: libtasn1-2-dev_0.2.10-3 couldn't be installed because it depended on libtasn1-2_0.2.10-3, when it wanted to install libtasn1-2_0.2.10-4. I installed both of the -3's manually, and then it was willing to proceed. It installed all of gnome and a zillion libraries (on a headless db server ;), and I was then able to build the ssh package.
Pete,If you think you're running sarge, and have that in /etc/apt/sources.list, it may be good to downgrade some packages if you find them with "apt-show-versions|grep unstable".. I was running a mix of sarge/sid from the old /pure64 and /debian-amd64, and downgrading all packages that I could, manually, solved me some problems.
/n