[conspire] wedged Debian Sid

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Moseley (moseley at hank.org):

> After a few years following Sid I've finally got a problem on one of
> my machines.

Sorry to take so long getting back to this thread:  I've been a bit
occupied.

I wrote an analysis of your problem, but then noticed a couple of
oddities that I'm curious about:

1.  Despite your system being on the Debian sid=unstable branch, you
requested a Debian-packaged binary kernel from the _stable_ branch 
(currently "etch"):

> $ sudo apt-get install -t etch linux-image-2.6.22-2-k7

So, why were you attempting to install a stable-branch package onto an
unstable-branch system?

2.  I notice you said your system is running on XFS filesystems.  I like
XFS quite to a fair degree (used to have my server on it), but, when
last I used XFS on Debian, the distro-packaged binary kernels didn't
include the XFS filesystem drive patch.  At the time, I had to build my
own kernel, and then migrate my system to XFS, one filesytem at a time.

Is it still the case that Debian's precompiled kernels omit XFS?  (I
suspect it is.)  

Ah, looks like "yes":

> $ uname -a
> Linux bumby 2.6.6-xfs-athlon #1 Thu Jul 22 15:22:53 PDT 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
>
> It's an Athlon XP 1800+ with xfs file system.  I think I had to patch
> in xfs last time I build the kernel (whichlooks like, eh, about 2004).

If "yes", what was the point of attempting to install such a kernel,
irrespective of which branch you were pulling it from?

I cannot help noticing that something you were trying to install had
source code package kernel-patch-xfs as a dependency.  This implies to
me that you probably _did_ need to compile your own kernels, were aware
of this fact, and perhaps had been doing so.  If that is the case, it
makes it all the more puzzling that you were also seeking to manually
invoke apt-get to fetch a _precompiled binary_ kernel package.

3.  Part of the dependency-snarl you encountered seemed to involve the
libc6-dev development libs.  Are those libs necessary for your
operations, i.e., do you have a need for them?  (This is a minor matter 
compared to the other two.)