Building an useful list to keep an eye on when migrating from i386

[ismael@nerim.net]

Hi,

I was looking for this information, maybe this trick will be useful for
someone (or maybe there is an easier way to do it).

I wished to know exactly which packages installed on my i386 Debian would
not be available on a newly installed amd64 Debian.

First, from your i386 Debian, make a raw list of installed packages. I do
that like this :
$ dpkg --get-selections | sed -e '/\tinstall/!d ; s/^\([^\t]*\).*/\1/' >
i386_debian_pkg_list.txt

Next, from your amd64 Debian, make a raw list of available packages. You
can do like this :
$ apt-cache dumpavail | sed -e '/^Package:/!d ; s/^Package: \(.*\)/\1/' >
amd64_debian_avail_list.txt

Then, get the list of packages you won't be able to install :
$ cat i386_debian_pkg_list.txt amd64_debian_avail_list.txt
amd64_debian_avail_list.txt | sort | uniq -u


Great, I only have 200 packages that I won't be able to install on my new
amd64 system, in which 133 packages have been manually installed or
obsoleted on my i386 Debian. In the 67 packages leaving, I see only 3~4
packets for which I would make a 32 bits chroot. Quite enjoying :)

-- 
Jonathan ILIAS