This bug is why I have a love/hate relationship with Debian. This server runs unstable due to the fact that long, long ago I decided that unstable was stable enough and running unstable got me the latest packages so I wasn't a year or two out of date.
Since then things have been mostly stable... mostly. 99% of the time everything is just dandy. I update to the latest packages and everything goes great. The 1% of the time however, I'm completely fubar. Due to the aformentioned bug, mod_perl has been shut down on this box completely, pending new packages. It's stupid. It's also my fault for going with the unstable debian tree instead of stable or testing. However, with no easy access to the physical server anymore (ie: it's not sitting on my bedroom floor) and now a strong desire for server availability (with the tdi messageboard and it's rampant viewers ready to go for blood anytime the server goes down :), means that a re-install isn't really possible.
If anyone knows a safe way to go from unstable to say, testing, without screwing things up even more, I'd be interested in hearing it.
And yes, I will stop updating things that are working :\
I never use testing so I can't say if it's doable to use it for a web server.
But from the security point of view, it would be a very bad choice to use testing. The security update are done on a timely fashion for debian/stable (I believe debian is very good at that) and debian/unstable update follows quickly. Then to enter testing, security related updates wait as any other update at least two weeks leaving your testing server vulnerable.
You could consider using stable. I tried once MT on woody and it worked correclty (by the way MT is not a Free Software). I don't know what are the requirements for clubTDI.
For me the problems with stable are the outdated MTA and friends such as spamassassin, but backports are available.
Note that downgrading is explicitely NOT supported. Downgrading to testing should work by ONLY changing 'unstable' with 'testing' in the sources.list. Downgrading to woody without reinstall is not reallistic in my opinion but the reinstall could be done remotely in a chroot (but it's tricky).
Anyway the next sarge is still expected in december (ok it's not realistic).
Christophe
Shucks, I should have warned you...
I did a dist-upgrade on another server (not my own) to the latest update. A new version of perl 5.8 was pulled in, breaking mod_perl (segfaults). This broke RequestTracker which requires Mason/mod_perl. Since /var/cache/apt/archives was already emptied out, my ownly resource was to:
apt-get -b build-dep source libapache-mod-perl && dpkg -i libapache-*.deb apache-common*.deb apache.deb
Which did the trick... but took a while since it also compiles apache-ssl and apache-perl which aren't required when using apache + libapache-mod-perl. But it worked flawlessly with the same config files and directory locations, which rolling my own from upstream sources would not have done.
Don't forget about snapshot.debian.net, where you can grab whatever version you want by date. I may just do the rebuild that you did though, as long as I can always update the newer version on top, cool!
Just warn me before Arc.;)
Next time I'll check out snapshot.debian.net... when perl broke things on me I was in a rush of course to get it going for a demo someone was going to do, and recompiling seemed like the surest way of having the latest & greatest but still being good. Tracking down the right "old" packages that still solve dependencies together doesn't sound too easy...
Either way, APT is better than RPM...