Retry for corrupted deb downloads

Registered by Mackenzie Morgan

Currently, when a deb becomes corrupted during download from apt, dpkg errors upon trying to configure it. During distribution upgrade, this means that around 20 errors might pop up because that package being corrupted causes dependency hell, and then the upgrade dies. When a deb is corrupted on download and cannot be configured, there should be a way for dpkg and apt to communicate so that dpkg tells apt "that didn't work, get a new one." Apt would then re-download the deb and send it back to dpkg to configure,. It shouldn't be corrupted the second time.Technically, it could be, so maybe have to do up to 3 tries so that if it's actually a problem with the deb on the server it doesn't infinitely loop, but if it corrupts more than once it has a good chance of recovering.

This would avoid situations like the one I encountered where around 30 packages were not upgraded and I had to try to configure them one at a time tracing their dependencies back to the corrupted one.

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some things to consider:
* Kernel and openoffice are each tens of MBs
* Much of the world is on dialup, or very expensive broadband.
redownloading openoffice (~30mb?) 3 times can be 1/5th of a persons monthly download cap.
- kgoetz

(?)

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