Hi Devuaners,

I installed devuan following dev1fanboy's guide and ended up with
an amd64 kernel and i386 package binaries.

First of all, I'm curious if those choices are explicit in the installer.
(I thought had I asked for amd64.)

My main question is this. Now I want to compile some
software that requires amd64. I've already added the
architecture using 'dpkg --add-architecture amd64'
and then apt-get update.

When I tried this 'apt-get install gcc:amd64' I got this
error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 gcc:amd64 : Depends: cpp:amd64 (>= 4:4.9.2-2) but it is not going to be installed
             Depends: gcc-4.9:amd64 (>= 4.9.2-1~) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Is it possible to somehow convert the entire toolchain (or even
installation) to amd64, or do I need to go back to the
installer?

I'll piggyback another installation question: how do
people port their /etc when starting from a pristine
installation? I used to just overwrite everything in the new
/etc with the old, then fix what ever would break.

Years ago, I'd written a script to compare directory
trees, reporting which files belong solely to tree
A, which solely to tree B, and to report when the
file content or timestamp at a particular path differs
between the trees. However it doesn't check file type
such as links, etc.

Is there are usual way to do this?

I'm thinking it makes sense to use git for the purpose,
to see changes and have a choice to restore them if
necessary file by file. I could also see wanting
to have per-directory repositories.

Managing /etc is certainly one of the signature
administrative tasks of a Unix system. I know it still
throws me anytime when I try to fix something, hack at
/etc/someprogram for a while and find the issue is related
to a setting in /etc/default/someprogram. Maybe I'll write a
script to comment at the top of each config file that has a
/etc/default/ sibling so that /etc/someprogram would get
this.

### WARNING!! Additional settings for this service may be found in /etc/default/someprogram.

I'll close here. Thanks to all who are developing and working with Devuan!

Cheers,

Joel

--
Joel Roth