Re: does /var/games have to be deleted on purge? (if it's empty..)
Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> writes:
> On Mon, 04 Jan 2010, Holger Levsen wrote:
>> On Montag, 4. Januar 2010, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>> * It's sometimes necessary to purge a package and reinstall it to
>>> fix some weird problem, or if not necessary at least expedient.
>>> For example, if one accidentally deletes a configuration file,
>>> one of the faster ways to get the original configuration file
>>> shipped with the package back is to purge and reinstall the
>>> package. It saves unpacking the package somewhere and manually
>>> copying out the configuration file.
> For this, you actually should be using --force-confmiss.
Is there some way to pass that flag through apt-get or aptitude? By the
time I've resorted to aptitude download to get the *.deb to run dpkg on,
it's usually easier to have just done aptitude purge, aptitude install.
I bring this up not because it's the only method (I know it's not), but
because it's really common, and I even use it myself because I don't
usually remember other methods or they take a bit more thought. I've seen
lots of Debian users do this, people who are going to be rather surprised
if that suddenly causes their data to be removed, and I'm not sure we can
reach all of those people to communicate this significant of a behavior
change.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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