[ limiting to devel- ] Wouter Verhelst wrote...
> I think a proper procedure should involve a script that:
[ sane criteria ]
> We currently don't have anything remotely like the above, and I think we
> should.
Yes, but I doubt it would be used a lot. There's a wide-spread culture
of re-installing instead of upgrading, also centralized management for
system configuration and "cloud storage" for users' data make that
even easier.
Even I used architecture migration for a clean-up: New installation in
parallel, then sync the interesting stuff (this requires some additional
hacks to make it more or less carefree). And I always found a lot of
cruft that supports the notion this was the right choice.
Doing this by hand is of course neither fast nor simple. The migration
script you requested could change that, however it's a delicate job,
full of pitfalls, desaster if anything goes wrong, so nobody would want
to take the burden of maintaining it. I bet there still are a lot of
hand-crafted i386 systems out there that never made it to amd64 because
the admins don't dare to. I bet as well these systems are so filled with
quirks any automated migration will to unable to handle them.
So, however is in charge of such a script, they can expect to have a lot
of hard work while constantly receiving flames from people where the
procedure failed. Doesn't quite look tempting.
Christoph
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