cygcheck -p indicate obsoleteness?

cygcheck -p indicate obsoleteness?

[Vince Rice]

tl;dr version: can cygcheck possibly be improved (I know, PTC :) ) to show that a package is obsolete, instead of just showing the “current” version? 

Longer explanation of where the request came from:
I’ve had an alias for c=clearw.exe for quite some time. I did an update today to get the bash exploit fix, and while I was at it updated the other packages that needed to be updated. Whereupon my alias didn't work, which was because clearw.exe was no longer present in /bin.

Hmmm. I was pretty sure I knew what provided clearw, but to confirm...

$ cygcheck -p .*clearw.*
Found 1 matches for .*clearw.*
ncursesw-5.7-18 - Utilities for terminal handling

Ah, something must have happened to my ncursesw, I just need to reinstall it. So I fired up setup to install ncursesw-5.7-18. Except that I couldn’t find it.

After looking around for a while, I then did a cygcheck -c. Which showed that ncursesw had the same version as ncurses. Interesting.

I then did a cygcheck -p “.*ncursesw.*” I got a long list, among them
...
ncursesw-5.7-18 - Utilities for terminal handling
ncursesw-5.7-18-src - Source code for Utilities for terminal handling
ncursesw-5.9-20140524-1 - Utilities for terminal handling
...

Hmmm. I then went back to setup and thought to uncheck “Hide obsolete” packages. And lo and behold, there was ncursesw, with a name of “ncursesw - obsoleted by ncurses”.

So, ncursesw was obsoleted, and thus I should use clear.exe instead of clearw.exe. However, it took me a while to figure that out because cygcheck -p didn't indicate that the ncursesw package was obsoleted.  Thus, the request.

Thanks, and thanks very much for cygwin in general.

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple