Debian will actually allow you up upgrade your libraries in lib.  In the olden
days I'd either switch my symlinks using a backup boot partition or do is with
a bootroot floppy.  Now Debian makes that easy!  While one can use apt and
dpkg to install RPMs, I try to (where possible) stick to the standard debian
distribution.  The reason for this is I'm not completely sure how dpkg would
take into account the dependancies for a non-debian package.  It might just
happily install it, I don't know.  Tracking dependancies and software conflicts
is really one the best features that really set Debian apart from the other
distributions, including Red Hat.  I first started using Debian as a "try it 
and let's see if it works" solution to get pppd, mgetty and glibc2 together on
a single machine.  At the time I tried RH and Slackware distros to see if 
everything was glibc2 (which is wasn't).  Only the Debian distro tracked 
library compatibility with its packages and because of that it made life easy
for me.

Does anyone else remember the pain in the you know where when glibc2 first 
came out?

	Mike