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hpr2547 :: MSYS2

In which I talk briefly about the history of MSYS2 and Cygwin and why you might want MSYS2

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Hosted by clacke on 2018-05-08 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
msys2, cygwin, windows, command-line, pacman, package manager. 2.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2547

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Duration: 00:10:57

general.

In the beginning there was Cygwin, by Cygnus Solutions (later acquired by Red Hat), then came msys, a lightweight derivative with no package manager, no fancy integration tools, just the bare minimum necessary to support a gcc compiler and the GNU autotools.

msys2 is cygwin minus the package manager plus an adaptation of the pacman package manager from Arch, and a big archive of packages of all kinds. It offers a friendlier command-line experience than Cygwin does.

I failed to mention here that msys was explicitly made to support the MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) flavor of GCC, which is intended for building native Windows applications. GCC for Windows has two types of output, cygwin or mingw, where cygwin is for source code that expects POSIX-y facilities and mingw is for code that should compile (possibly with some minor adjustments for C dialect) equally well under GCC and Microsoft Visual C, and should produce about the same output.


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Comment #1 posted on 2018-05-08 12:27:50 by ClaudioM

MSYS2 is What Cygwin Should Be

First off, thanks for the mention, good sir! :-)

Secondly, thank you for this episode. As much as I use Cygwin at work, I despise...DESPISE...having to use the Cygwin Installer to install/update/remove packages. MSYS2 is what I've always wanted from Cygwin: an integrated, command line package manager for updating packages inside of the POSIX-compatible environment, just as you would do on any Unix-like system.

I'll have to start backing up my configuration files in order to make the big switch on my Windows PCs at work.

Comment #2 posted on 2018-05-08 14:26:09 by Gavtres

Git Bash

Linux newbie here. I am working on a new project and last week, as a requisite, needed to install Git for Windows. I was wondering about the voodoo magic behind Git Bash, so thank you for the explanation.

By the way, cool alternate "beatbox" version of the HPR outro. :-)

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