Hmm... thanks again for the pointers. So far searching those and the debian mailing list archives has not turned up a straight answer. Everything that addresses this issue is a bit ambigous. I think that my original interpretation was wrong... I believe that the point they are making is that programs compiled against libc5 (glibc) will not be compatible with libc6 (glibc2) which is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned, and it wouldn't mean that minor versions of libc6 were incompatible with each other.
If I find an authoritative answer (or when I break my system again by misunderstanding the given information) I'll post the answer here.
Phoenix
