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Re: Aptitude's reintall



On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 04:35:36PM -0300, Gabriel Parrondo wrote:
> 
> Aptitude users's manual explains the reinstall men?? command as follows:
> 
> > Reinstalls the package.
> > 
> > Note that the reinstallation will not be saved when you quit aptitude or 
> > perform an install run for technical reasons. (essentially, the underlying 
> > software layers (dpkg and apt) do not provide any way to find out whether 
> > a reinstallation was successful or not). 
> 
> I'm not sure what does it mean with "will not be saved when you...". Is
> it that there will be no way to know that the package was reinstalled or
> that the action will be executed immediately and not when I press g? Or
> maybe something else.

It means what it says.  Aptitude keeps track of a package's state:
installed, not-installed, installed-but-not-configured.  It contains no
state "reinstalled".  So, you tell aptitude to reinstall a package.  It
fetches the .deb and tells dpkg to install it.  When dpkg returns, it
either returns successful or not, but aptitude has no way to record a
correct reinstall.  You should watch the screen.

It is for this reason that I consider a reinstall and a
deinstall-install cycle as not the same thing.  The latter will be
tracked by aptitude.

Aptitude will never do anything before you hit 'g'.

---

Is this an academic question or are you having a problem?

Doug.


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