Chicken-and-egg problem with glibc and rpm

[David Ruggiero]

Today's fun and games:

Okay, so I want to upgrade to the newest version of "patch", which I apparently need for some of the latest-and-greatest kernel patches. (This is for my firewall machine - generic RH6.2 with a fairly-current 2.2.17 kernel from rawhide rpms, necessary because I need IPSEC support) So I snarf the "patch" package's .rpm and try an install:

-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        60007 Nov 26 12:23 patch-2.5.4-8.i386.rpm
[/tmp]# rpm -ivh patch*
error: failed dependencies:
        libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2) is needed by patch-2.5.4-8

No problem, I need a new glibc. I get it and try and install it first:

-rw-r--r--    1 root     root    13100397 Nov 26 12:59 glibc-2.1.97-2.i386.rpm
[/tmp]# rpm -ivh glibc*
error: failed dependencies:
        rpm <= 4.0-0.65 conflicts with glibc-2.1.97-2

Ooops, it conflicts with my current version of rpm. Okay, so let's upgrade rpm first instead:

-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      1232892 Nov 26 13:41 rpm-4.0-4.4.i386.rpm
[/tmp]# rpm -ivh rpm*
error: failed dependencies:
        glibc >= 2.1.92 is needed by rpm-4.0-4.4
        db1 = 1.85 is needed by rpm-4.0-4.4
        libbz2.so.1 is needed by rpm-4.0-4.4
        libdb-3.1.so is needed by rpm-4.0-4.4
        libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2) is needed by rpm-4.0-4.4


SO...long story short, I can't install glibc because it will break rpm, BUT if I install the new RPM first, it will fail because I've still got the old glibc, and I'll have no way to install the new one, because I need a working "rpm" to do that....<sigh>

What do people do in chicken-and-egg situations like this? I'm all ears for a solution (a pointer to an appropriate net.resource is fine, too).

thanks,
David

PS: I know that RPM is pretty good at figuring out dependencies, etc, if you give it all packages to be upgraded at once shot (ie, "rpm -ivh *.rpm). But I figure that may not apply here, where one of the packages to be installed *IS* rpm itself.