On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 12:54:47PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Thursday 16 January 2020 12:48:50 Roberto C. Sánchez wrote: > > > On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 12:43:17PM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > > Well, it seems it's failing because it tries to enable the php7.3 > > > module -- which it can't do, because the module's not THERE. > > > > > > If it were me, I would attempt to purge this package (not just > > > remove), and then reinstall it. > > > > The --reinstall should have handled that. > > But unless its been fixed, that won't work, where the purge then install > usually does. Its miss-worked that way since wheezy, here.
My concern here is that the files in question are under /etc which means they may be marked as conffiles. Reinstalling a package whose conffiles have gone missing will NOT restore the conffiles -- because dpkg assumes the local sysadmin deleted them for a Good Reason. The workarounds for that are to purge and then reinstall, or to use special apt/dpkg options to force missing conffiles to be reinstalled. I'd have to look up how those options are spelled, because they're long and weird. "Purge" is really easy to remember.
