Re: Can't reinstall all Jessie packages

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

Quoting maderios (maderios@gmail.com):
> I  can't reinstall all Jessie packages this way
> dpkg -l  | awk '/^i/ {print $2}' |xargs apt-get --reinstall install
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2792 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0
> not upgraded.
> Need to get 0 B/1,700 MB of archives.
> After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
> E: Couldn't configure perl-base:amd64, probably a dependency cycle.
> 
> I get the same using
> aptitude reinstall  '~i'
> But I can reinstall perl-base separately
> If I hold perl-base, other packages like systemd-sysv,then
> install-info, etc...,  can't be configured too
> 
> I found an other way to reinstall all packages, one by one. It works
> but it takes a very long time:
> 'for i in $(cat /root/DPKG/packages-list.txt); do apt-get install
> --reinstall "$i"; done'
> 
> Any idea? Thanks

It's always nice to be told what you're aiming to do, and why.

If you reinstall, you'll have to unpack everything. Is it that you
distrust what's already been unpacked in the past? If so, have you
tried using debsums?

debsums -l    will tell you if any packages are missing an md5 sums file.
debsums -ca   will check all the files' integrity including conf files, and
              report on any that are different (ie normally just the conf
              files that you changed yourself).

That way, you can just reconfigure the packages, if that's what's
important to you.

Cheers,
David.