Forcing RPM to reinstall broken packages

[Dan Coutu]

I could swear that I knew how to do this but either I've got a memory 
parity error or RH9 has crippled RPM so that it can no longer do what I 
need.

I've been noticing flaky behavior of my system since I did the upgrade 
to RH9. I figure it may be due to crappy media (burned from online 
iso's) and so did an RPM --verify --all and sure enough I see some 
problems (like missing files, bad MD5 checksums, etc.) So I figured I'd 
force a reinstall of the broken packages. Naturally I fired up the new 
redhat-config-packages utility expecting to even more wonderful features 
that were available in gnorpm and kpackage. Bzzztttt! I've got news for 
you folks,

<rant> redhat-config-packages draws a powerful vacuum!

It lets you add or remove packages. Period. But not even all packages, 
it groups them under categories that may or may not make sense to you. 
It's a very simple interface. Too simple for my taste. I need to replace 
gcc-java-3.2.2-5. Okay, so which package is that in? Can't find out 
using the new GUI tool, gotta fall back to the command line. Bah!

Anway, </rant>.

I'd really like to have RPM figure out which packages are screwy and 
just fix them, but I suppose that's too much to ask. Actually it would 
probably stupidly stomp something that I actually wanted to save as is. 
Sigh.

So the real question here is: does anyone know a way to get rpm to 
reinstall a given package so that corrupted files are replaced with good 
ones? I'm concerned that the --force switch may be too much and just 
make a worse mess of things.

Thanks,

Dan