On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 08:50:40PM +0900, Roger Shimizu wrote:
[...asking for armel to be retained...]
One way in which the need to keep armel around would be reduced is if we
could somehow upgrade from armel machines to armhf ones, without
requiring a reinstall.
After all, armel has been around longer than armhf has, which means that
there may be some machines out in the wild that were installed (and
upgraded) when armel existed but armhf did not yet (or at least, was not
stable yet). Some of those machines might be armv7 machines that would
be perfectly capable of running the armhf port, except that it wasn't
around yet when they were first installed, and switching to armhf
without reinstalling isn't possible.
I once did try to do a similar migration on my Thecus (from arm to
armel, rather than armel to armhf), but that failed miserably; and since
I hadn't installed the firmware update to be able to access the console
so as to figure out what went wrong, that essentially bricked the
machine.
If there was a supported and tested way to upgrade older armel
installations on hardware that actually works with armhf, then those
machines wouldn't need to be able to run armel anymore, and part of this
problem would go away...
--
< ron> I mean, the main *practical* problem with C++, is there's like a dozen
people in the world who think they really understand all of its rules,
and pretty much all of them are just lying to themselves too.
-- #debian-devel, OFTC, 2016-02-12
