Re: 32-bit to 64-bit

[Kelly Clowers <kelly.clowers@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 6:51 AM, Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> There are two problems with that:
>
> - Not all packages have been multiarchified, including some important
>   packages with many reverse dependencies like perl and python.
>   Crossgrading those will leave you with many broken packages, at least
>   temporarily.  Cross your fingers that apt will show a way out.
>
> - Apt does not properly support crossgrades, for a package foo which is
>   not "Multi-Arch: same" it treats foo:i386 and foo:amd64 as two
>   different, conflicting packages.  This means that it will remove
>   foo:i386 before installing foo:amd64 which obviously does not work for
>   Essential packages, so you have to crossgrade those with dpkg alone.
>   This is quite a hassle since you have to install all necessary
>   libraries beforehand.
>
> I have crossgraded some packages in i386 chroots that way, but in the
> current state of affairs I would definitely _not_ dare to try a full
> crossgrade on my main system with almost 2000 installed packages.

I bet it is doable.  I wish I had a 32 bit system to try it on, I love doing
crazy things with the package manager, like when I combined
significant parts of Ubuntu (X and GTK) into my Debian install,
and later transitioned back to pure Debian.

Cheers,
Kelly Clowers