MSYS2-packages

I do appreciate it as a daily user of MSYS2. However the bigger thing that enabled them is indeed Cygwin project since it unlocked the path to build things that are using strict Unix tooling. autoconf, Make, bash etc cannot run under a pure Windows environment. They are too dependent to the underlying system being a Unix. To use pacman, bash and make in MSYS2, you need msys-2.0.dll. Even they cite Cygwin's URL in the runtime package [1]. And they basically patch Cygwin to enable this [2] Without Cygwin enabling the path, it wouldn't be possible to build GCC for Windows without completely changing its build system. It would be a DOA fork while Mingw and PE32+ support is a part of GCC nowadays. The nice and genius part of MSYS2 is that it is there to primarily encourage you to develop native Windows software that has better cross-platform b

On Nixpkgs master, you can cross compile to MinGW and Cygwin. Native Cygwin builds are also currently in progress: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/447520. I would expect this to be done very soon, there year even (holidays permitting). There is a MinGW build of Nix but it is missing some features. There has been MSVC build of a fork in the past and I would like to revive that also. There some some open questions relating to Nixpkgs's heavy use of Bash, but longer term I would like to compete for Windows in all ways: - Support all cross (MinGW, Cygwin/MSYS2, MSVC ABI with LLVM, MSVC with Wine) - Be Cygwin packages - Be https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages / https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages - Be VCPKG All these things have slightly different trade-offs, and Nixpkgs is very good at portability, so we should simply do them all

I am still on WSL1 due to the filesystem performance with WSL2. I recently tried to move more of my workflow towards MSYS2 but various things keep breaking for me without obvious reasons. Latest issue I encountered was that GNU parallel simple does not work. [1] [1]: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/3289

My last experience with MinGW-w64 was when I was trying to compile my C++ simulation code in Windows and finding out that AVX instructions were not working because the compiler had misalignment-related bugs. (The issue is still open in https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/1209) MinGW/MSYS certainly had appeal to former Linux devs who didn't want to touch the horrors of MSVC, but Zig (with its included Clang compiler/runtime) might end up being a better solution for people trying to compile C/C++ code on Windows in a stable manner.

Yes, ProcMon is the Windows equivalent of strace, with some filtering capability built-in. It also shows you the stack involved with a particular event, which can be useful for diagnosing the otherwise black box that is Windows. Eg [1] [1]: https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/138#issuecomm...

I'm not going to comment about cygwin (because its build process is not as transparent) but instead about msys2, the spiritual successor to cygwin. See for yourself: https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/blob/master/coreut... is the `pacman` style `PKGBUILD` used to build the `coreutils` package.

This has been answered before. No, the msys2 repo doesn't follow the Cygwin packaging versions or schedules at all. They are built from the recipes at: https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages .. they link to msys-2.0.dll which is Cygwin derived and are thus GPLed and exist to provide a POSIX-y shell and build tools to allow building: https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages .. which are full of native Windows software under various licenses.

You can always update the configuration to better match Arch's and file a pull request against it. Here's the link to the msys2-packages repo for Vim, for example: https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/tree/master/vim Same build system and everything, it just requires some finagling and copying of the PKGBUILDs.

I find Babun slightly laggy on my system, so my go to tool is Msys2 https://msys2.github.io/ Msys2 is a fork of Cygwin, it does not do away with POSIX emulation, but I find its package management better than Cygwin's. Quite a few packages are supported https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages

Yes, pacman is wonderful. We're very grateful to the Arch Linux devs. You guys are all correct, we've not paid nearly enough attention to marketing. Here's the description I tried to post: MSYS2 is an updated, modern version of MSYS, both of which are Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer) forks with the aim of better interoperability with native Windows software. The name is a contraction of Minimal SYStem 2, and aims to provide support to facilitate using the bash shell, Autotools, revision control systems and the like for building native Windows applications using MinGW-w64 toolchains. We wanted a package management system to provide easy installation of packages, and ported Arch Linux's pacman. This brings many powerful features such as dependency resolution and simple complete system upgrades, as well as providing the build system (makep