On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Ted Unangst <t...@tedunangst.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 16:29, Marc Espie wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 01:20:32PM +0100, Peter N. M. Hansteen wrote: >>> James Griffin <jmz.grif...@kode5.net> writes: >>> >>> > I have the latest snapshot amd64 arc. I would like to change to the >> i386 platform. >>> >>> That will be a complete reinstall. >>> >>> > I think if I delete/remove all packages then boot into the i386 bsd.rd >>> > and install all the i386 binaries, etc. and then reinstall all my >>> > packages this will be ok and will mean I don't have to reinstall from >>> > scratch using a cd iso image? >>> > >>> > Is this ok to do? Will it cause problems? >>> >>> Preserving pkg_info output will likely serve as a useful to do list for >>> reinstalling the packages. I tend to do that myself when for one reason >>> or the other I want to do a complete reinstall with a mind to rebuild >>> the system much like before. >> >> You mostly no longer need to preserve that all that much, as you have >> everything as syslog entries these days... > > Unfortunately, if you still have access to the old /var/log after the > reinstall, it means you probably tried to do something like an upgrade > to preserve the filesystems, which means you also probably have left > over bits. > > IIRC the only way to preserve an existing filesystem doing a new > install is to leave it out of the disklabel (or omit the mount point) > and add it back later, which is unlikely to be what anybody would want.
That's something something I depend on on every upgrade, which for me is a complete new install and preserving some of the partitions by leaving them without a mount point, then after installation re-adding them to fstab. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person doing or depending on this :) --patrick
