Hi! On Sat, 2013-03-30 at 20:11:11 +0200, Mikko Rasa wrote: > On 30.03.2013 03:51, Daniel Hartwig wrote: > > On 30 March 2013 06:33, Mikko Rasa<t...@tdb.fi> wrote: > > > Some background: I'm migrating my home server to new hardware and > > > considering > > > changing the OS to 64-bit as well. Since apt now supports multiarch, I > > > thought > > > I'd do this by installing a 64-bit kernel first and then updating > > > userspace bit > > > by bit as necessary and as time permits. Unfortunately, reality turned > > > out to > > > be much more complicated. > > > > Cross-grading an entire system is not a documented or supported > > procedure. You could possibly still proceed as you intended, if you > > are adventurous. It will take some encouraging of dpkg (lots of > > ‘--force-FOO’) and you will not receive support for the procedure > > here.
> > > If a package with Architecture: all depends on a package with a specific > > > architecture, then that dependency can't be fulfilled by a foreign > > > package. > > > > <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec#Dependencies_involving_Architecture:_all_packages> > > > > As above, this is by design. The developers are aware of the > > highlighted dependency handling and the desire to perhaps move away > > from it eventually. I am therefore prone to closing this as > > not-a-bug, the difficultly in cross-grading a system is neither apts > > or dpkgs fault, they handle the situation correctly. > Perhaps it could be implemented as a configuration option to begin > with, and change the default later? Well, dpkg *does* have native support for cross-grading, see the last section in the announcement mail [0], apt does not though. That does not mean the current package metadata will allow this in all cases. I guess that wiki page might be outdated in other places too, for example cross-multiarch compilation is supported too, but I've not checked the page in detail. [0] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2012/03/msg00005.html> > I managed to put together a Python script which changes the > architecture of an installed Debian system from i386 to amd64. I > didn't even need to use any --force; processing packages in correct > order by dependencies is enough, since dpkg does less dependency > checks than apt. It's not perfect, but it left me with only about > two dozen broken packages to be fixed by hand, as opposed to the > several hundreds I encountered when trying to do this manually. If dpkg fails on some packages, one issue might be because they are not yet properly marked with a Multi-Arch field, as noted also in the announcement mail. Thanks, Guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
