Life in unstable is kind of messy sometimes.

Hit a libc upgrade problem on a box that was running an old version of Sid.

The error and workaround were recorded in 465753, but it took more finding than it should. Although I don't pretend to understand what went wrong here, I'm not sure a "me too" bug report will help if I can't reproduce it. So I'll blog and let the search engines help wiser minds figure it out later.

Unpacking replacement libc6 ...
/bin/sh: relocation error: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: symbol _dl_out_of_memory, version GLIBC_PRIVATE not defined in file ld-linux.so.2 with link time reference
dpkg: warning - old post-removal script returned error exit status 127
dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ...
/bin/sh: relocation error: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: symbol _dl_out_of_memory, version GLIBC_PRIVATE not defined in file ld-linux.so.2 with link time reference
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.7-8_i386.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess new post-removal script returned error exit status 127
/bin/sh: relocation error: /lib/tls/libc.so.6: symbol _dl_out_of_memory, version GLIBC_PRIVATE not defined in file ld-linux.so.2 with link time reference
dpkg: error while cleaning up:
 subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 127
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libc6_2.7-8_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)