Hello, 1) ldd was old. When upgraded libc-bin then things became much happier.
2) Caused by the "unsupported" double major upgrade. While I understand that "we do not support it" it should be noted that huge amount of people are or will be bitten by this and the libcrypt "bug" (or future incompatibility). 3) What exactly happens, or at least it did for me several times now, that dist-upgrade chokes on libcrypt, and it requires libpam0g, libc6 and libcrypt upgrade to work. It does not "require" (deps) libc-bin, so ldd stayed old. But I guess that made usrmerge really angry. Up to the point of a seemingly unexplainable and unfixable error. If I was the maintainer I would loudly complain about not supported upgrade path but would still patch around that line 222 to check ldd, check the ldd output (old one see the cp static) and handle the case, at least providing a clear reason and suggest possible ways to get up from the bottom of the dark pit. Updating libc-bin, as mentioned, helps a lot in this particular case. g.
