Mopping up issues on an old sparc - need advice

[Eric Jorgensen <alhaz@xmission.com>]

   I've got an ss10 that's running woody, was dist-upgraded from potato. It
is in a remote facility running headless. 

   Over time, it's grown some interesting warts. I'm wondering how best to
resolve them. 

   First, for some reason dpkg thinks that dialog and whiptail both
conflict with debconf. Baffled here. I've never had to force an issue wrt
dependencies and conflicts on debian, how do i just beat it in there? 

   Also, libc6-sparc64 conflicts with libgcc1 and gcc-3.0. What gives? Best
course of action? 

   I'm also wondering how advisable it is to try a dist-upgrade to Sarge on
a remote, headless system. If anything goes wrong to where i can't ssh into
it, that means i have to schedule a time that's convenient for the guy
hosting my machine and drive a half an hour and put a serial console on it.
When it needs attention every 3 or 4 years, downtime tends to stretch to a
week or more before i can get out there and get it running again. 

   I have looked through a bit of the mailing list archives and have no
concerns about kernel package issues, since I always run custom kernel
builds. Might be nice to know if the dist-upgrade is going to change the
silo configuration so i can change it back. 

   Any advice?