Re: does /var/games have to be deleted on purge? (if it's empty..)

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Mon, 2010-01-04 at 17:39:48 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.

Here's several alternatives:

  $ aptitude reinstall -odpkg::options::="--force-confmiss" pkg

or:

  $ apt-get install --reinstall -odpkg::options::="--force-confmiss" pkg

or:

  $ aptitude download pkg
  $ dpkg --force-confmiss -i pkg_*.deb

regards,
guillem