SANE install catch-22

[Ted Llewellyn <llewell@interport.net>]

Well, this is very pretty.    I'm running Debian 2.0 with the default
SANE--the doc says v0.71 but I think it's v0.74.  I was going to upgrade
to version 1.0.  To do that, I have to install the new libc6, and to do
that I have to upgrade libstdc++2.8, and apparently to do THAT, dpkg has
to unconfigure itself.  Since I'm running dselect, how is this supposed
to work?  Here is the output from dselect:

dpkg: considering removing libstdc++2.8 in favour of libc6 ...
dpkg: no, dpkg is essential, will not deconfigure
 it in order to enable removal of libstdc++2.8.
dpkg: regarding .../base/libc6_2.0.7u-7.1.deb containing libc6:
 libc6 conflicts with libstdc++2.8 (<< 2.90.29-2)
  libstdc++2.8 (version 2.90.29-0.6) is installed.
dpkg: error processing
debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/base/libc6_2.0.7u:
 conflicting packages - not installing libc6

Thanks,
Ted