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Comment by claar | Hacker News Reader

I'm a *nix/FOSS guy with 15+ years of experience.

I spent a couple minutes trying to figure out what MSYS2 was from the project page/the project wiki/Google, and then just gave up.

Really, a single sentence on the summary page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2 and the wiki at http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/Home/ would go a long way.

For anyone else in the same boat, I assume this is a replacement for MSYS, which according to http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS, is a "collection of GNU utilities such as bash, make, gawk and grep to allow building of applications and programs which depend on traditionally UNIX tools to be present."

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It looks to be a package manager for mingw packages:

http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS

At a minimum, they should just put a URL to the above.

This is MSYS (not 2). The web presence of MSYS/MinGW has always been poorly designed. Hopefully it will get better with MSYS2.

I've installed it recently using info from: http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/

It has a port of pacman (!) from Arch Linux for package managing. It feels so much better than mingw-get (package manager used for MSYS/MinGW).

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 (makepkg) which is used to make these packages. The set of software-building recipes (PKGBUILDs) for MSYS2 itself are at:

https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages

.. and those for MinGW-w64 (i.e. native Windows software) are at:

https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages

Both 32 and 64bit are supported.

mingw and MinGW-w64 are not the same thing, so that URL would be less than useful.

MSYS2 is firmly in the MinGW-w64 camp. The schism happened when GCC was ported to 64bit Windows and we've not looked back since (much; working together is always to be preferred but sometimes that is not possible).

We're investigating why sourceforge will not let me update our description.

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