I really need some help here udevhotplugusbusbmount etc etc. 2028

There is no way that something in stable would want to pull in something from unstable or testing. That has NEVER happened to me in six years of using Debian and I have never heard of it happening to anyone else who didn't try to mix releases.

Mixing releses is the only way that can happen on stable. If you have installed something from testing or unstable that has such a dependency then apt will try to follow the chain.

Yes, on unstable and testing it does that because there was a change made that was incompatible.

I don't need to search the net, I read the mailing lists. I am aware of numerous problems of this sort with unstable and testing, but not in stable. Since stable was released over a year ago, there is no way it could have a dependency on something that was released in the last few months.

I think you don't really understand the Debian scheme. It is this:

stable: Officially released. No new versions, only backports of security fixes. Currently is "sarge", or 3.1r2. New releases tend to take 1-3 years. The r numbers represent rollups of security hotfixes.

testing: Development version. Will become the next "stable" at some point. New versions of things every day, flowed down from unstable after a certain time without serious bug reports. This one is currently "etch".

unstable: Bleeding-edge version. New versions of things uploaded daily, sometimes with minimal testing. Usually works well, but sometimes weird things happen. This one is always called "sid".

So when you say "the stable distribution", I take that to mean "sarge", or 3.1r2 + recent security updates. That will never, ever, depend on anything in testing or unstable. Certainly something as important as udev having such a dependency would have been found long before now.

If you started with stable, and then performed an upgrade to unstable or testing or installed something from one of those that you downloaded, then you no longer have stable. You have something else, either unstable, testing, or some kind of Frankenstein.

Note that if you go to ftp.debian.org and manually pull the latest version out of the pool directory, you will probably be getting the version from unstable, not stable. All three versions are kept in the same directory tree and there are Package.gz files that determine what versions go with what release.

No, there was not. Not in stable. You must not be running stable, or at least not a pure stable. I can believe that it was temporarily broken in one of the others, but not in stable. This is not "touching faith" as you put it in another post, but six years of experience on multiple computers.

Because of the way stable is released, it is impossible for it to have a dependency on kernel 2.6.15, since that kernel was not available in June 2005 when sarge-stable was released. Yes, 3.1r2 was released in 2006, but it was security updates only and did not include a new kernel.

If via a security update something had inadvertently come to depend on a newer kernel, even indirectly, that would have been fixed ASAP since it would be a serious policy violation.

In addition to that, I am in fact using udev and hotplug on a number of Debian stable systems with kernel 2.6.8 and apt has never tried to drag in 2.6.15 or any other kernel during an update. So, you'll forgive me if I believe you are mistaken in your buttesment.

I'm glad you got it working but I think you'll be back with a new problem soon enough. I think I'll let someone else help you then.

-- - Bob Hauck - A proud member of the unhinged moonbat horde.