dselect, apt-get and unstable

[David Fokkema <fokkema@nat.vu.nl>]

Hi there!

I'm a new Debian user after using RedHat, lfs and my own small (and thus
very incomplete) distro. I'm especially happy with the great packaging
system and the large number of packages which can easily be installed
using dselect. At first, dselect was a bit disorienting, but it handles
dependencies nicely. However, I'm using the stable branch and I am happy
with that except from the fact that I'd like to play AVI-files. So that is
in unstable. Big deal. And it depends on the new libc6. Ok, no problem.
But even if I don't select anything dselect, it wants to upgrade 244
packages, install 26 and remove 34 and leave 3 not upgraded. I don't like
that. If I want to upgrade to unstable, I'll let dselect (or apt-get)
know. Now, I only want to install avifile-player and its dependencies
without upgrading my whole system. If it needs the new libc6, I'm happy to
install that too. But not a whole bunch of other things just to let me
keep kword, for example. I couldn't get apt-get to work either, it does a
better job not wanting to upgrade my whole system, but it will happily
remove all of koffice for me.

Can anyone help me with this?

Thanks!

David