slink->frozen upgrade problems

[john s anderson <jacobs@azstarnet.com>]

Greetings! 

I've been trying to move a system at work from Red Hat to Debian for the
last day or so, without much success. The initial slink install goes okay
(I'm using the CD from the O'Reilly book), and I'm able to select and
install various things.

However, I'd like to update the installation to at least frozen, and
probably to unstable -- and that's where the problem comes in. After doing
the base install, I add the frozen line to sources.list, do `apt-get
update` -- all of which works as expected.

Any attempt to install pretty much anything after that won't work, because
of some problem between debianutils and libc6. It looks to me like they're
 mutually pre-dependent, or something. Here's the error output from
`apt-get install libc6`:

<output>
penguin:~# apt-get install libc6
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  g++ libstdc++2.10 cpp gcc debianutils libc6-dev libstdc++2.10-dev
binutils
  ldso
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  timezones libstdc++2.9-dev egcc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libstdc++2.10 libstdc++2.10-dev
8 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 3 to remove and 582 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/7390kB of archives. After unpacking 9989kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
E: Internal Error, Couldn't configure a pre-depend
</output>

Any help would be welcomed, or if there's anything else I should try, etc.
please let me know. I need to get this box back up and working pretty
soon, or the boss-man is gonna be unhappy...

john.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
John S Jacobs Anderson                       jacobs@genehack.org
www.genehack.org        <-----  GeneHack (bioinfo*linux*opinion)