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

Later on, we can update the database, either adding new package or replacing one with a newer version.

On computer with internet access
pacman -Syw liblz4 procps python3 --cachedir .
repo-add ./offline.db.tar.gz liblz4-1.8.2-1-x86_64* procps-3.2.8-2-x86_64* python-3.6.6-1-x86_64*
On offline computer

Update the repository with the newer files, and update the offline computer as usual. 

cp -ruv offline_packages /home/user
pacman -Syu
pacman -S --needed procps python3
Troubleshooting

Above is the theory, in practice, pacman sometimes does not find some packages, although they are there. Here some tips to solve those issues

  • Look at missing dependencies in the error message. Some packages may refuse to install because they depend on another package that is not available in the repository (for instance libgdbm).

More information:

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