e2fsck causing apt-get warnings

[sktsee]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:12:33 +0530, Santanu Chatterjee wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 11:33 PM, sktsee <sktsee at tulsaconnect.com>
> wrote:
>> Try "sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgmime-2.0-2"
> 
> Thanks. This works. But the thing is I get similar warnings for more
> than 200 packages. I can of course write a script to identify those
> packages and run your suggested command to reinstall them. That would be
> one way to solve this.
> 
> I was thinking if there was a way (maybe some option to a dpkg
> invocation) that will just repopulate/fix the file(s) that contain the
> file list for different installed packages. If at all possible, I would
> like to avoid reinstalling all those 200+ packages since they are
> otherwise working fine... just dpkg seems to have 'forgotten' what files
> they contain.

It sounds like the /var/lib/dpkg/info directory got hosed. All of the 
information about a package's file list, md5sums, install/remove scripts, 
debconf templates are stored in that directory. There's no easy way that 
I know of to have dpkg "regenerate" the lost files without reinstalling 
the packages since those files are contained in the software's deb 
archive.

You could probably restore some of the files from lost+found, but that 
entails examing the contents of the file to determine what kind of data 
it contains (file list, md5sum, post-install script, etc.) and which 
package it belongs too. Time consuming, unless you can script it.

If you haven't cleaned out your apt archive cache, then a lot of the 
installed packages are still present on your system. Apt can reinstall 
from cache and won't have to fetch them from a repository.

Obviously though, the best way to recover those missing files would be to 
restore them from backup :)

-- 
sktsee