MSYS2

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MsYs2 and MsYs2 (Minimal sYstem 2) is an independent rewrite of MsYs, a (command-line) shell for development usage, and based on modern Cygwin (POsIX compatibility layer) and MinGW-w64 (from “MinGW-builds”), with the aim of better interoperability with native Windows software.
It includes: MsYs2-shell and MinGW-w64 Win32 shell & MinGW-w64 Win64 shell.
It supports & can work with both 32bit & 64bit multiple toolchains & targets, (for 64bit a 64bit operating system is needed).
MsYs2 is a successor of MsYs and MinGW-builds.
MsYs2-shell uses “pacman” for downloading packages from repo, and these are GPG signed & verified. Packages are by developer: lexx83 (Alexpux), mingwandroid, niXman.
MsYs2 is a complete opensource development environment+shell solution+system.
It can obtain related all toolchains & dependency packages from “MinGW-builds” and MsYs2 REPO, for compiling/building other software. It can also obtain various directly usable tools & language support & compilers, like: perl, python, ruby, openssl, etc.

A user has these options to choose from: by using MsYs2-shell & MinGW-w64 Win64 shell:
(option-A), either download Qt or QtCreator source (from MsYs2 repo) and compile/build inside MsYs2,
or (option-B), a user can get official Qt source or QtCreator source, and then compile/build using mingw-w64 toolchains obtained from MsYs2 repo, from the windows Cmd-shell,
or (option-C), a user can get Qt or QtCreator software-building scripts from MsYs2’s “MINGW-packages” repo, and compile/build using mingw-w64 toolchains obtained from MsYs2 repo, inside MsYs2-shell,
or (option-D), a user can download pre-built binary files of Qt & QtCreator (dynamic/shared and/or static built editions) inside MsYs2, and run+use them instantly without compiling.

Obtain & Install

MsYs2, MsYs2. Use HTTPs based secure connection and obtain MsYs2. run the installer binary. Install MsYs2 in C:drive in “msys2” folder.

Initial setup of MsYs2

• run MsYs2 shell (Command Prompt). C:2\msys2_shell.bat

• first update msys2 core components (if you have not done it yet):

pacman --needed -s bash pacman pacman-mirrors msys2-runtime

You must exit out from MsYs2-shell, restart MsYs2-shell, then run below command, to complete rest of other components update:

Exit out of MsYs2-shell, restart MsYs2-shell, then you are ready to use MsYs2-shell.
Note: for initial installation & setup, please also see [1]. Here -s means “sync”.

Prepare MsYs2 for Qt related build development environment

• start MsYs2-shell. run/execute below commands to load MinGW-w64 sEH (64bit/x86_64) posix and Dwarf-2 (32bit/i686) posix toolchains & related other tools, dependencies & components from MsYs2 REPO (MINGW-packages, MsYs2-packages):

pacman -s base-devel git mercurial cvs wget p7zip

pacman -s perl ruby python2 mingw-w64-i686-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain

Note: the i686(32bit) toolchain loads into /c/msys2/mingw32/bin (C:2\mingw32\bin) directory location, and, x86_64(64bit) toolchain loads into /c/msys2/mingw64/bin (C:2\mingw64\bin) directory. Perl, ruby, Python, OpenssL etc loads into /c/msys2/usr/bin (C:2\usr\bin) directory.

• Build Qt : follow Qt building/compiling related articles
  • MinGW-64-bit
  • or Building Qt 5 from Git, etc
  • Qt can also be compiled/built, using the software-building scripts from MsYs2 based MinGW-w64 Packages Repo, for details see below “PKGBUILD” section.

Obtain Pre-Built Qt & QtCreator binary files and Use instantly without Building/Compiling

If you are going to build Qt using MinGW-w64 toolchains which are inside MsYs2, then you do need to do get pre-built Qt binary files, but choice is upto you.

• start MsYs2-shell. run/execute below commands, to install/load, a pre-built dynamic/shared library environment edition of Qt & QtCreator binary files from MsYs2 REPO, for developing, testing, compiling/building or releasing opensource or closedsource software:

pacman -s mingw-w64-i686-qt-creator mingw-w64-x86_64-qt-creator

If you also want to install/load, a pre-built static library environment edition of Qt binary files, for compiling & releasing opensource projects, (with almost one/single file based standalone or portable binary executable file), then run/execute below command:

pacman -s mingw-w64-i686-qt5-static mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5-static

Note: There is no static edition of QtCreator.

How to build using MsYs2’s software-building scripts (PKGBUILD & patches)

• run MsYs2-shell (C:2\msys2_shell.bat)
• create a folder to download build related scripts, then git clone software-building script REPO, from MsYs2’s MINGW-packages REPO (mirror)

mkdir /c/msys2/repos
cd /c/msys2/repos
git clone https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages.git

• goto your choice of software-building script’s sub-folder, which has a “PKGBUILD” file. For example, here we are showing how to build Qt5:

For example, we want to build Qt5, so here our command will be: cd /c/msys2/repos/mingw-packages/mingw-w64-qt5

• install built package. (make sure you are inside correct sub-directory, for our example, you need to be inside here /c/msys2/repos/mingw-packages/mingw-w64-qt5) (the -U is “upgrade”)

pacman -U ${package-name}' ''.pkg.tar.xz' ''

so for our example, our install command will be: pacman -U.pkg.tar.xz

Building Qt from source manually

follow the the usual instruction . Make sure tonot use MsYs paths on the configure command line – use regular Windows paths (with forward slashes, if you want to avoid escaping backslashes).