upgrading to libc6

["James R. Van Zandt" <jrv@vanzandt.mv.com>]

I have a package in hamm which is currently linked against libc5.  I
would like to upgrade to libc6, so I can recompile and resubmit it.
However, I'm having a hard time.

I started by downloading and installing the libc6 and libc5-altdev
packages.  No problem.

However, I want to compile, so I downloaded libc6-dev.  That conflicts
with libc5-dev, on which many other packages depend.  For some of
them, I was unable to find libc6 versions:

    libdb1-dev_1.85.4-3.deb
    libfcgi1-dev_1.5.1-1.deb
    libg++27-dev_2.7.2.1-9.deb
    ncurses3.0-dev

I then tried upgrading with dselect's ftp method.  It offered to get
libc6-dev and a few others, but also wanted to delete many packages,
including gcc and dpkg-dev!:

It also wanted to delete some packages that depended on libc5,
including mesa-dev.  (Shouldn't it try to upgrade them instead?)

I also got several messages like this:

    gdb depends on ncurses3.4
    ncurses3.4 does not appear to be available

I backed out of the dselect session, for fear of breaking too many things.

I hoped there would be some relevant documentation in the libc5-altdev
package, but it has *no* documentation -- not even a copyright.

Is it really time yet to upgrade to libc6?  If so, how? 

                              - Jim Van Zandt


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