recovery from "rm -rf /var/lib/dpkg/info" ?

[Kristian Erik Hermansen]

Hey guys,

I did something dumb.  I was playing around with some debs and hacking
some control files, when I accidentally removed /var/lib/dpkg/info !!!
 Now, if I even try to do 'aptitude reinstall ~i', I am greeted with
"Writing extended state information... Error!".  dpkg --list still
shows all the currently installed packages, but I am unable to
reinstall.  Does anyone have a good idea on how to recover from
this???  Ideally, I think it would be easiest to reinstall all the
packages, since they are all from the repositories and none are
non-standard.

Let me just state that I do not want to do any file recovery, even
though I know quite well how to do that.  This should be able to be
reversed with some apt/dpkg kung-fu...
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen