Right. Then I think I had the right idea (of what MSYS2 is/aims to be). I was sort of hoping it was less self-contained - and more integrated with the windows-side.
Thank you for the detailed reply.
Thank you for the detailed reply.
Both types of executable can also be run from from PowerShell or cmd.exe too of course. In very few cases you may need to add the correct "bin" folder to your PATH before you do so.
If you want to build MSYS2 packages using the build system we've adopted, then you need to use our shell. That is all (and a reasonable requirement).
You can't link (at the C/C++ level) msvcrt.dll linked-executables with Visual Studio > 6.0 executables / libraries and expect things to work properly for anything but the most trivial cases.
These aren't things that MSYS2 imposed though, these are just the realities of inter-operation between GCC and MSVC as they stand at present.
Maybe I did :-)
Thank you for all your detailed answers.