Re: Crossgrade instructions seem broken

[Brian Sammon <debian-users-list@brisammon.fastmail.fm>]

There's two approaches I would consider here:

If you know exactly which packages you want downloaded, I think you can use "apt-get download" to just download the packages you tell it to, and it will ignore all dependency requirements, and not download any other packages.  This would be a partial improvement over using wget.

If you want apt to download the packages you ask for and figure out what other packages it should download so that all the dependencies can be satisfied, then you may have to fix your "apt --download-only" invocation.
I would try going from

> #apt --download-only install dpkg:amd64 tar:amd64 apt:amd64

to something like
   apt --download-only install dpkg:amd64 tar:amd64 apt:amd64 dpkg:i386- tar:i386- apt:i386-

It seems to me that apt is (ignoring the --download-only at this point of the process) assuming that you are asking to install a _second_ instance of dpkg, a _second_ instance of tar, and a second instance of apt, and deciding that that is not possible/allowed.  So telling it explicitly to find a solution that involves uninstalling the i386 versions of those packages may allow it to proceed to the "actually do something" part of the process, where it will notice the "--download-only" part, and download the debs for the packages it decided you need to install, and do nothing for the packages it decided you need to uninstall.

I'm not 100% sure about all of this, in part because my experience is with "apt-get" instead of "apt".