disaster upgrading to elf

["Michael E. Deisher" <deisher@enws428.EAS.ASU.EDU>]

After being assured by others that upgrading to the elf packages was
painless, I took the plunge.  I should have known better.

My free hard disk space was limited so I just downloaded the base and
devel directories and the Packages file.

I ran dselect and unselected all the packages that dselect wanted to
upgrade that were not yet on my hard disk (that is, those
packages not in base or devel).  That was really tedious.  Is there a
way to convince dselect NOT to make all these choices FOR you?

While unpacking the packages there were numerous instances of

   perl: can't load library 'libdl.so.1'

Then the following errors occured during configuration:

   dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of elf-gcc:
    elf-gcc depends on elf-libc (>5.0.9-2); however:
     Package elf-libc is not installed.
    elf-gcc depends on elf-binutils (>2.5.2l.20-1); however:
     Package elf-binutils is not installed.
   dpkg: error processing elf-gcc (--install):
    dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

That's bizarre!  gcc is supposed to replace elf-gcc.  Why on earth
does dpkg think that the old elf-gcc package should be configured when
it just removed it???

   dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of tclX:
    tclX depends on tcl; however:
     Package tcl is not installed.
   dpkg: error processing tclX (--install):
    dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

Why is dpkg trying to configure tclX?  I deliberately unselected it
before installing so that dpkg would leave it alone.

   dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of tk:
    tk depends on tcl; however:
     Package tcl is not installed.
   dpkg: error processing tk (--install):
    dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

Again, these packages were replaced by the elf packages so dpkg should
not be trying to configure them.

   Setting up libc5 ...
   mv: can't load library 'libc.so.5'
   dpkg: error processing libc5 (--install):
    subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 16  

At this point, it looks like the system is hosed.  Glad I backed up to
tape first.  What a waste of time, though!

--Mike