On Mon, 03 Jul 2017, Adam Rosi-Kessel wrote:
This isn't on purpose and not something I've ever thought about it. It looks
like migrating an existing system from i386 to amd64 is a cumbersome and
potentially glitchy process. Is it still true that there is no foolproof and
easy way to transition?
We call that cross-grading. And yes, it is cumbersome and there is
still no foolprof way (let alone an easy one) to transition.
In fact, cross-grading is troublesome enough that you'd likely be told
to simulate it in a VM first -- just because someone managed to do it in
jessie with a given packages set doesn't mean it would work as well for
stretch, or with a different packages set, for example -- so you would
end up having to do it twice.
It would be easier and much safer to just install amd64 somewhere else,
and move your data files and most of the config.