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Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 02:47:06 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: Fw: clear
References: <OFBDD3F800 DOT 4A27063E-ONC125733D DOT 00340B51-C125733D DOT 00341376 AT iht DOT com>
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PDeRochambeau AT iht DOT com wrote:

> In Cygwin Package List, it says that clear was removed and that ncurses
> should be used instead (?). However, libncurses7 and libncurses8 ARE
> installed on my machine, according to setup.exe, which means, I guess,
> that ncurses is installed.

No, it means that libncurses is installed.  There is also a 'ncurses'
package, and that is what contains the clear command.  (You can look
this up yourself using the Package Search page.)

The reasoning for why packages are split like this has many reasons. 
For one thing, it allows library versioning, where you have multiple
packages compiled against multiple versions of the library.  For
another, it allows installing just the binary runtime components of a
library, without pulling in all the other nonessential parts just
because the user happened to have installed a package that is linked
against that library.  And that is just what has happened in this case.

Brian

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