Ok for our first flame, libc6-dev has just had a dependency on linux-kernel-headers added.
Now, this package has version 2.5.something in debian/sid; yet I am running 2.4.22.
Should the versions match? If so, then this is fundamentally flawed. Otherwise, the package name is a poor choice.
Here’s a discussion about it on debian-devel: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200311/msg00033.html
Furthermore, the newest libc6 managed to totally break XFree86 and it refused to start after I was forcefully rebooted by the power.
Plus, if we _need_ linux-kernel-headers now because it has been split from the libc6-dev package why the hell is it 2.5.99?! would that not conflict with my 2.6.0-test9 kernel installation?
Anyhow, after downgrading libc6 itself I can get back into X. I can’t seem to downgrade or remove libc6-dev to get rid of the linux-kernel-headers package though.
More - http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200311/msg00412.html
Some notes - the linux-kernel-headers package is the private-section of glibc which contains linux-esque functions for user-space.
It does not need to match the kernel version, as the headers should be reasonably backwards-compatible.
These headers are not linked into the kernel, and ideally shouldn’t be used by user space programs either. It seems they are only for use internally by glibc, with some small exceptions.
SO, why are they in a package called ‘linux-kernel-headers’ ??!?