Forcing RPM to reinstall broken packages

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, at 3:25pm, coutu at snowy-owl.com wrote:
> 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.)

  Those don't necessarily indicate problems.

  Indeed, for configuration files and the like, they are normal.

  I had thought that RPM verified a package's checksum before installing it,
but I can't find documentation to back that up, and don't have time to look
further, right now.
  
> 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?

  "--replacepkgs" will tell RPM to replace a package that is already
installed.

  I'm not sure that's the right thing to do in your case, but I'm also not
sure if there *is* a right thing to do in your case.  :-)

> I'm concerned that the --force switch may be too much and just make a
> worse mess of things.

  Yah.  See above.  :)

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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