[rhn_mk1]

I'm not sure how much this helps, but better fire up your Debian 3 inside a virtual machine. Then you can copy files with scp and commit them to git or whatever other version control on your main host.

And those flags should be used first on the Debian 3 machine, at least those which are supported there.

In my experience, jumping straight to the new version and making it "hold its nose" only ever works if you already know what you're doing.

[pjungwir]

With vagrant, the guest's /vagrant directory is whatever host directory contains the Vagrantfile. Using that seems even easier than scp. You can also set up some other shared folder if you're less lazy than me.