Re: converting from i386 to amd64 without rebuilding

[Steve Lane <drsteve@rna.berkeley.edu>]

On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 03:41:31PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 11:49:20AM -0800, Steve Lane wrote:
> > Greetings.  We've got a 4-core (2 x Core 2 Duo) server that was originally
> > built as an i386 machine, then converted to the i386 bigmem kernel,
> > and *then* converted to the amd64 kernel. None of the packages on the
> > machine, however, are from the amd64 port - they're all i386.
> > 
> > Is there some simple and straightforward (or even not-so-simple or
> > straightforward) way of converting the machine from the i386 port
> > to the amd64 port without rebuilding it from scratch using the amd64
> > installer, i.e. to reinstall all the i386-specific packages from the
> > amd64 repository?
> 
> I can't think of any way.  You can create a chroot with debootstrap, but
> that's essentially just a harder way to run a fresh install.
> 
> After all you can't have both the 32 and 64 bit version of libc6
> installed at once in the same place, so you can't replace it while other
> packages which depend on it are using the other bitness.

Yeah - I discovered that the hard way ;)

That's more or less what I figured.  Guess I'll be rebuilding at some
point :)

Thanks,

--
Steve Lane
System, Network and Security Administrator
Doudna Lab
Biomolecular Structure and Mechanism Group
UC Berkeley