Hi,
Is there a "Repair permissions" feature (like on MacOS X, for those who have used it) for Debian packages, through apt/dpkg/(etc.)?

I have two Linux (ReiserFS) partitions in my system, a large one for a stable distro and a small one for testing other random distros. I recently tried copying a Debian install from the testing partition to the large partition. Somehow, in the process, I lost all non-rwx permissions (suid, sticky, etc). This broke a bunch of things; I still haven't gotten some (ie. xscreensaver screen lock) working again. Is there a way to just restore all permissions to their defaults systemwide?

nope, because there is no real 'default' set of permissions. I think you have to completely reinstall. I've had similar system-wide permissions problems, and have always been told to reinstall

If .deb packages don't contain "default" permissions, then how do apt/dpkg figure out what permissions to give files when they're being installed? All I want to do is return the permissions to what they would be immediately after an install. The information is there somewhere; the question is, is there a nice way to artificially re-apply it?

Is there a way to extract the contents of a .deb file to a subdirectory (ie. /home/me/temp) without actually installing it? If I could do this, I could pull the permissions from the extracted files and apply them to their actually-installed counterparts. This would be really messy, but it would work.

In any case, I seem to have gotten most things working again, through the magic of Google , so I'll likely stick with this install unless/until something really important breaks, and I can't fix it.

I'm not exactly sure how the permissions are set up. But I believe that once the permissions are changed(for whatever reason) even a reinstall won't modify them. I think it's due to the whole 'control every part of your machine' theory