On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 11:50:25AM +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > On Jo, 16 ian 20, 12:59:23, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > > > 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. > > That would be '--force-confmiss'. > > '--force-confask' might do it as well, the man page mentions it triggers > in case a conffile has been "modified".
Those are the options for dpkg. If you're doing it through apt or apt-get, then there's another layer of option wrapping that goes around them and makes them even harder to remember or type. I'd have to ask the bots in #debian for the magic incantations. I do know that it involves CamelCase and ::double::colons:: because of Object Oriented Poisoning. (And naturally, NONE of this is in the man pages, because why would they bother documenting it in a place people can actually find it.) Of course, breaking the problem into separate steps so that you can use the human-rememberable dpkg options is also a viable solution. ;-)
