[the reposted version, silly mailing lists]

Hello world, 

glibc 2.3.1-14 should be entering testing "tomorrow" (sometime around 30
hours from now, depending on your mirror). Along with it, some 800 other
source packages and all their binaries are expected to be updated. For
those of you running testing systems, please take care of the next few
days' upgrades, as a number of things *will* break.

php4 will be broken on all architectures. This will be fixed by the
removal of the Conflicts: line from the libc6 packages in a forthcoming
revision. It can be worked around by not upgrading until that version of
libc6 is available; by upgrading to php4 from unstable; or by manually
forcing the dependencies (and not using apt).

On sparc, the libc6-sparc64 package has been removed; this will mean
you'll be unable to install the versions of gcc-3.0, gcc-3.2, and a
number of related packages in testing. This can be worked around by not
using the versions of those packages from unstable, or by not upgrading
libc6 until new versions of the affected packages have entered testing.

On hppa, a number of programs that make use of the __clz_tab symbol will
fail to find it. That this symbol is visible was a bug in the toolchain,
that has been fixed; unfortunately the fix breaks old software, including,
eg, wget, lftp and other programs that link against libcrypto. You can
work around this problem by avoiding using the affected programs, by
rebuilding them from source, or by not upgrading libc6. Some compatability
code will be introduced in the next version of glibc so that this isn't
an issue.

Similar problems related to other symbols might appear on hppa or other
architectures. The problem is believed to have been fixed on i386, but
may not have been entirely addressed. Please report problems you find
in the usual manner.

There may be undiscovered interactions between the software that isn't
being updated yet, and the 800 packages that are being updated. Given that
so many packages are being updated in a single hit, and that a number
of core packages (gcc, perl, python, gnome, kde) will differ between
testing and unstable, this is significantly more likely than usual.

In short, please take care administering any testing systems you rely
on over the next few days.

If you wish to put libc6 on hold, you can do so at the command line by:

	# echo libc6 hold | dpkg --set-selections

or by using dselect or aptitude or similar.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <ajt@debian.org>
Debian Release Manager