Re: Can a leaf package require SSE2 on i386?
On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 04:40:14PM +0200, Adrien Clerc wrote:
> I'm in the category of people who installed their Debian 8 years ago, on
> an old AMD processor, only i686. My hardware was upgraded since, but the
> system remains. I've searched for cross-grade, but nothing serious comes
> out, except "reinstall everything". If you have some clear documentation
> (at least some steps, I'm curious enough to read some apt manuals), I
> think you can go on dropping i386 architecture.
It can be done if you are competent and confident. I successfully
crossgraded a production system from i386 to amd64 a while back, roughly
following the steps from this blog post:
http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/972-How-to-amd64-an-i386-Debian-installation-with-multiarch.html
The system in question was originally installed in 1999 (with potato, I
think) and has been contiuously upgraded since then.
Caveats from my experience, though:
* I was doing this on a server, not a desktop.
* I put some effort into removing obsolete or unnecessary packages
first and making sure that amd64 versions of all my non-Debian
packages were available, in order to simplify things. This procedure
is much easier to execute on a system whose package database is nice
and clean.
* I started out by cloning the relevant parts of the system into a
chroot, disabling daemon startup, and upgrading that, until I'd got
far enough that I was comfortable I could finish the job.
* I did this on a stable release. Doing this in testing or unstable
where it's more likely that the archive might introduce new versions
of Multi-Arch: same packages part-way through the job would have been
rather more exciting.
* I know dpkg and apt very well, was a contributor to the multiarch
design, and am comfortable recovering things by hand if necessary.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: