circular dependency : failed dist-upgrade to unstable

[Balbir Thomas <thomas.1037@osu.edu>]

Hi
I tried to upgrade my debian (potato, with kernel 2.2.19) to unstable using apt,
after editing sources.list. Howver the process stoped reporting errors of 
unmet dependencies . So I tried to do "atp-get -f install" as suggested but 
even this bails out with the error message :

perl: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.2' not found (required by /lib/libdb.so.3)
E: Write error - write (32 Broken pipe)
E: Failure running script /usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure --apt


I also tried apt-get install libc6 , which reported a similar error.

I seem to have run into a circular dependency problem . Since 

1) "dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/libdb2_2%3a2.7.7-8_i386.deb" stops with the
error "libdb2 depends on libc6 (>= 2.2.3-1)"

and

2) "dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.2.3-6_i386.deb" stops with the 
error "libc6 depends on libdb2 (>= 2:2.7.7-4)"

Could you please show me a way out ?

sincerely
b thomas