[conspire] "chiark’s skip-skip-cross-up-grade" (Debian 8 i386 directly to Debian 11 x86_64)

[Nick Moffitt]

On 27Jul2022 06:36pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> At the begining, host "chiark" was on Debian 8 jessie -- 32bit.  The
> end-state was Debian 11 bullseye -- 64-bit.  and he managed it while 
> skipping intermediate releases (to save on downtime), exposure to 
> packaging bugs in intermediate releases, and general opportunities to go
> wrong.

I am writing this on a VM running Ubuntu 20.04 x86_64.  I installed it in 2004 as Debian Sarge i386.  It's gone through a few live cross-upgrades like this in its day, most notably the Debian Sarge to Ubuntu Dapper move in 2006, by way of Warty.

The more interesting upgrades of this type were the folks who migrated to libc6 in the 90s without even so much as a reboot.  Now THAT took planning!