Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
OK, its the best analogy I could come up with. I don't know if fixing this is possible, hopefully someone can help you. I hope you had goodbackups (if not, do them now if you can).
Turns out that it's not necessarily a problem.As long as I don't reboot the server, backing out of the problem is doable -- all I have to do is revert to the previous libc6, using:
aptitude -t oldstable install libc6 and things are back to where they were.However, if a reboot is done, then that is a near-disaster condition -- libc6 is sufficiently deep in the system that it's pretty much impossible to resolve the conflict.
A couple of years ago, I was working on this machine with a consultant, and we tried to do this upgrade then. Following a reboot, we made another try to resolve -- another attempt to upgrade libc6-dev failed, as did an attempt to downgrade libc6. We tried to remove libc6 entirely, and that crashed the machine.
Here's how we managed to get out of that problem: http://aleph-null.tv/go.php?doc=20070920-2351-503.xmlThus, since the upgrade we wanted wasn't essential, we decided to not bother with it then. However, we're now to the point where we need to get the machine upgraded to lenny, so we need to figure out a way around the problem.
I need to do some checking, but removal of libc6-dev (and possibly other -dev packages) before attempting an upgrade seems to have merit.
Smith