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I have installed the MSYS2 from their website, however, I'm not able to find the mingw-get package manager. I tried searching the MSYS2 packages by

pacman -Ss mingw-get

and looking into the installation folder C:\msys64\mingw64\bin but it simply not there. My questions are:

  • Does the MinGW shipped with MSYS2 include the mingw-get package manager?
  • If not, how I can install it?
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MSYS2 doesn't include mingw-get, it uses pacman instead.

From their website:

It features a package management system, Pacman, to provide easy installation of packages. It brings many powerful features such as dependency resolution and simple complete system upgrades, as well as straight-forward package building.

Pacman is much more powerful than mingw-get was. You should be able to install additional packages using Pacman instead of mingw-get.

MSYS2 was built around Pacman. So even if you could install mingw-get (like, manually downloading it and unpacking it, or rebuilding it from source), it's unlikely that it would do anything useful in an MSYS2 installation.

Adoption of Pacman also determine how the packages get built (through PKGBUILD files with the build rules), that's why MSYS2 is a rewrite of MSYS, where each package build has been remade from scratch. Pacman is so much at the core of MSYS2 that it's hard to detach them from each other.

(Perhaps a similar comparison can be drawn to Linux distributions. Can you install rpm on Debian, or dpkg on Fedora? Yes you can, but you most likely won't be able to use them to manage the packages installed on your distro, since the distro is built around the other package manager, which is at the core of that distro, in a way that's really hard to dissociate from it.)

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13 Comments

@Foad mingw-get is an MSYS1 thing, so even if you can install it under MSYS2 (like, manually downloading it and unpacking it), it's unlikely that it will do anything useful in your MSYS2 installation, which was built to be managed using Pacman instead.
Or, perhaps: mingw-get is/was a part of MinGW that's been made obsolete in MSYS2 by the adoption of Pacman to better fulfill that role.
mingw-w64 and msys2 are forked from the earlier mingw and msys projects (although MSYS2 may be better described as a new project than a fork)
@Foad msys2 includes mingw-w64 (not mingw.org). Not sure what you mean by "synced with the upsteram"
@Foad You might find this page interesting: github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/History
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