MSYS2 / MSYS / MinGW
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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
- 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