4 Nov
2019
4 Nov
'19
8:33 p.m.
On 2019-11-04 01:13, Andy Smith wrote:
I am definitely not encouraging anyone to try doing a
full > crossgrade. Last time I poked this list about the need to eventually
switch to 64-bit, a few customers tried crossgrading and there was a
high incidence of disaster. I would not like to see that repeated. >
Seriously, stop at the kernel unless you know what you're doing or >
want a
challenge and don't care if everything asplodes! 😀
I've just done this to my VM "for the lols" and I would tend to agree.
The basic cross-grading steps needed me manually install (using dpkg) both
Perl and Python which apt couldn't resolve by itself in order to get apt
updated to amd64. During the intial "apt upgrade" steps, I had to manually
reinstall Perl modules for Spamassassin which had been removed rather than
updated and prevented apt restarting services correctly, which causes it to
bail out. Later on during one of the "'Yes, do as I say'" operations,
apt
removed ifupdown which made the VM drop off the network.
After all was said and done, some packages which were previously
installed as
i386 had been removed and were no longer present, presumably because
they were
removed because the upgrade of a dependency didn't perform cleanly over
multiple invocations of "apt upgrade" as errors came up and had to be fixed.
irssi went missing and Apache mod_php was no longer installed; these are
probably because of the forcible upgrade of Perl or Python as well. I'm
still
tidying up the mess.
Unless you know what was installed and have backups of all your configs, and
can tolerate needless downtime, just don't bother.