Following the freeze, I changed the sources.list on one of my machines from stable to frozen and did a dist-upgrade to see how it would get on.
The trick with the interim perl version didn't work. Apt managed to leave me with three base package versions installed but the program itself missing. -> Suggest performing the perl upgrade manually before letting anything else get changed automatically. As a result of the perl hassle, a bunch of things decided that they couldn't be installed as an upgrade although they could be removed without trouble. As a result, a large number of packages evaporated. kbd insisted on being held back, even on dist-upgrade, until I forcibly removed it and reinstalled it. gconv-modules was not available by http but I needed it and it discouraged a bunch of packages from installing. The version of libncurses5-dev as listed in the website distribution doesn't match the version in the ftp archive. As a result, it fails to install with no warning I noticed. Some other things that are listed in the web distribution (and available by ftp) do not appear in the http index. "nan.h" now lives in a different place. Sigh. The upgrade of ssh does correctly assert that existing connections are not affected. However, I found that was unable to create any _new_ connections until I had closed all the existing connections and restarted sshd itself. Not a problem, but disconcerting. I'll try another machine in a couple of days; maybe this time I won't accidentally delete my typescript before I'm done. Alex.
