Noah Meyerhans wrote: > What are you trying to do? Are you trying to get lib6 or some other > package from woody or sid for your potato system? That will not work, > if that's what you're doing. dselect is trying to download all the > other packages because they depend on a specific version of libc. If > you install libc from woody or sid, you need to upgrade all the packages > that depend on libc. That's what dselect is trying to do. If you only > upgraded libc, everything would break, because the new libc is not > compatible with the old one.
Erm that's not correct. Glibc is pretty backwards compatible, except with rare and broken programs that use internal symbols. A package in stable will depend on something like: "libc6 (>= 2.1.2)". Unstable's libc6 is version 2.2.3, so it satisfies this dependancy with no problems. Upgrading to unstable's libc6 will certianly require some other packages to be upgraded -- those libc6 declares it conflicts with older versions of: Conflicts: strace (<< 4.0-0), libnss-db (<< 2.2-3), timezone, timezones, gconv-modules, libtricks, libc6-doc, libc5 (<< 5.4.33-7), libpthread0 (<< 0.7-10), libc6-bin, libwcsmbs, apt (<< 0.3.0), libglib1.2 (<< 1.2.1-2), libc6-i586, libc6-i686, libc6-v9, netkit-rpc But it will not force an upgrade of your entire system, and if any package stops working with the new libc6, that's probably a bug. Partial upgrades are not a bad or scary thing, folks. They are something Debian's dependancy system innately supports. -- see shy jo
