Reinstalling packages on Debian and Ubuntu
My recent migration from Arch Linux to Debian (testing) has been an extremely smooth one, but not without it's issues.
A small issue I ran into early on was a problem with totem, the video app,
crapping out. While I'm not sure exactly what the heck went wrong, the quick fix
was to reinstall the package and call it a day.
I honestly couldn't tell you the last time, assuming there was a last time, that I had to forcibly reinstall a package on Debian or Ubuntu. In fact, solid chance the last time I had to do this, I simply uninstalled and reinstalled the package.
That's no way to live, so after some research, I learned about the --reinstall
flag that tells apt install that it shouldn't just skip the already installed
package and to try to installing it again:
sudo apt install --reinstall some-packageObviously, this will work on Debian as well as Ubuntu as well as any distributions that are based on those flavors.