MSYS2 / MSYS / MinGW

This page is about:

• MSYS, MSYS is a collection of GNU utilities such as bash, make, gawk and grep on Windows.
• MinGW, "Minimalist GNU for Windows". MinGW is a minimalist development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications.
• MSYS2, a Cygwin-derived software distro for Windows using Arch Linux's Pacman. MSYS2 is an independent rewrite of MSYS, based on modern Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer) and MinGW-w64 with the aim of better interoperability with native Windows software.

MSYS and MinGW are mostly inactive now. MSYS2 is the active alternative.

References

MSYS2

• MSYS2 homepage
• MSYS2 on GitHub
• MSYS2 on SourceForge
• On pacman the package manager:

• Pacman rosetta, find the corresponding pacman command from those used in popular Linux distribution.

MSYS / MinGW

• MSYS
• MinGW

Tips

Install/update MSYS2 packages on offline computer

MSYS2 can be installed and updated on a computer that has no internet connection. It only requires a secondary computer with internet access. We follow the procedure on SO:

On the computer with internet access

mkdir ~/offline_packages
cd ~/offline_packages
pacman -Syw base base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain --cachedir .
repo-add ./offline.db.tar.gz ./*

Now copy offline_packages to an external storage device.

On offline computer

• Install MSYS2.
• Copy offline_packages to a path that MSYS2 can access (for instance C:/msys64/home/user/offline_packages)
• Edit C:/msys64/etc/pacman.conf:

• Comment out the [mingw32], [mingw64], [msys] repositories.
• Add a new section (update as necessary):

[offline]
SigLevel = Optional
Server = file:///home/user/offline_packages

• Then in an MSYS2 terminal:

pacman -Syu
pacman -S --needed base base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain