Re: [gentoo-amd64] Upgrading from amd64 to ~amd64.

[Richard Freeman]

On Mon, October 17, 2005 10:50 pm, Toby Fisher wrote:
> running system?  Is it just a case of changing to an arch of ~amd64 and
doing the upgrade?  I'll bet it isn't which is why I'm asking here - I'd
like not to have to start from scratch.
>

One tip I have is to avoid doing huge upgrades in a single shot, unless it
is on a testing-only chroot that you don't care about too much.

I would probably do an emerge -puD world and look at the likely-huge list
of packages.  I'd probably manually emerge stuff like portage / gcc /
glibc / toolchain early on.  I'd also pick out stuff like base system
files, PAM-related stuff, and any stuff related to servers you depend on
(maybe samba servers for around the house, a webserver, etc).  I'd upgrade
these individually so that you don't end up with a box that you can't
login to with no idea what broke it.  Once you have the guts of the system
upgraded and the system can actually boot correctly then you can upgrade
the rest and just fix the occassional non-critical breakage as you have
time.

I try to avoid doing mass-updates to critical system files.  Usually any
breakage in system files can be easily fixed, but it helps to know what
package broke the system, rather than starting with a wild goose chase. 
If you have a dispatch-conf with 500 files to update it is hard to know
which ones to pay attention to.  It is also nice to not have to boot from
rescue disks with limited access to editors/browsers/etc.

Often a straight emerge -uD world will work, but if you actually care to
maintain some kind of uptime on your system it never hurts to take things
carefully if a large number of packages are involved.

Note - this is general advice only.  I have not ever tried to "upgrade"
from amd64 to ~amd64.
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