News
2022-04-06 - Windows 7 / 8 support will be dropped late 2022 or early 2023
Cygwin 3.5 will drop support for Windows <8.1, which means the new requirement will be "64 bit Windows 8.1 / Windows Server 2012 R2". We expect the update to Cygwin 3.5 to be around late 2022, early 2023. For more information, look here.
A recent survey suggests that ~2-3% of our active users (excluding cloud servers and CI systems) are still using Windows <8.1. We recommend them stopping to update at the end of the year. We've enabled an inline warning message for them when they open a terminal.
For developers bundling our packages, we recommend simply pointing out the last version of their application that still worked with Windows 7 / 8 on their download page.
2022-03-04 - Sunsetting the SourceForge mirror in 30 days from now
Note: This should only affect systems not updated in over a year, or users that actively switched to this mirror, which is unlikely.
Due to space constrains and our ever growing package archive we can no longer update the SourceForge mirror. We already hit the space limit last year but worked around it by no longer syncing source packages. We have now hit the limit again, and decided that it is no longer worth it maintaining it.
We will remove the SourceForge mirror on 2022-04-03. We will delete the package databases as well to make DB syncs fail to avoid users using outdated software without them knowing it. After 4 more weeks we will delete the remaining packages and installers.
2022-05-07: The mirror has now been removed.
2022-02-24 - repo.msys2.org only available via HTTPS/TLS
We have switched repo.msys2.org to always redirect to a secure connection. If for some reason you require HTTP you can use one of our tier 1 mirrors.
2021-12-22 - Ongoing Cleanup of the base-devel
Package Group
The base-devel
package group is the set of packages required to be installed
before running makepkg
/ makepkg-mingw
. We have recently started to clean
this group up and moved some of the packages to be explicit dependencies in the
PKGBUILD
files instead.
One notable removal is various autotools related packages. There now exists an
autotools
and a ${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-autotools
meta package which will
pull in anything related to autotools which packages can add to their
makedepends
.
Further more the group was replaced with a package of the same name, to make adding/removing packages easier. Note that pacman prefers packages over groups for the same name, so the set of included packages is now listed here https://packages.msys2.org/package/base-devel
This cleanup can lead to build errors in case your build setup assumes certain
packages being installed with base-devel
. If that is the case make sure to
install those missing packages explicitly instead.
2021-12-21 - Potential Incompatibilities with newer Python setuptools
tl;dr: use export SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=stdlib
if you have problems
building/installing packages with newer versions of setuptools from pypi.
The Python packaging ecosystem is currently in the transition of removing distutils from CPython and moving it into setuptools. Historically distutils is patched quite a bit by us to make it work with our directory layout and to build packages with gcc/clang instead of MSVC. With this move our patches are no longer used and setuptools will fail in various ways, or install things into wrong places.
We are working with upstream to include our patches, but this will take some
more time. In the meantime you can force setuptools to use the (still patched)
distutils from the CPython stdlib via export SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=stdlib
The setuptools version in our repo however will continue to use the patched
distutils until all issues are resolved and is not affected.
🙏 Many thanks to the distutils and setuptools maintainers for considering our patches, despite Cygwin/MSYS2 not being officially supported by CPython.
2021-10-14 - OpenSSH 8.8 dropped support for old ssh-rsa keys using SHA-1
The recent OpenSSH update disabled support for old ssh-rsa keys using SHA-1 by default. See https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-8.8 "Potentially-incompatible changes" for details and possible workarounds.
2021-07-04 - Some Mirror/Server/Repository Changes
Primary Pacman Server: We've switched the main server in the pacman config to https://mirror.msys2.org. This server will redirect pacman to an up-to-date mirror near you for each file. We hope this will improve the download speed for users further away from Europe. We also have a new overview of all mirrors here.
Repo Path Renaming: We've renamed mingw/i686/
to mingw/mingw32/
and
mingw/x86_86/
to mingw/mingw64/
and added symlinks for the old paths. This
means 100GB of resyncing for mirrors using rsync (sorry :/). Having the repo
name in the directory path allows us to have one mirrorlist configuration for
all repos in the future.
Sourceforge: Due to space constraints we no longer host the source packages on Sourceforge. They are still available on our main server and on all mirrors.
2021-04-21 - R.I.P. mingwandroid
Ray Donnelly is a co-founder and developer of MSYS2 and after a multi year fight with cancer passed away on 2021-04-20.
If you want to know more about his life and work see his fundraiser descriptions:
- https://uk.gofundme.com/f/help-Ray-fund-a-hospice-bedroom
- https://uk.gofundme.com/f/arku72-help-ray-fight-cancer
He was always helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly, and he will be greatly missed.
2021-03-25 - Temporarily broken msys2-launcher package
The repo contained a broken msys2-launcher package for a few hours today causing things like "msys2.exe" to just show an error dialog. You can get back to a working setup this way:
- Start
C:/msys64/msys2_shell.cmd
to get a shell - Run
pacman -Suy
to get all the fixed packages
2021-02-27 - New server for repo.msys2.org and packages.msys2.org
We have moved repo.msys2.org (and package.msys2.org) to a new server. There was
a short downtime, but everything should be running great now. Big thanks to
appfleet.com jsdelivr.com for sponsoring the new server.
New mirrorlists for Pacman will be published soon. After you get them, your package installs and updates should be faster than before and without the 404s and glitches.
With the migration, Christoph (@lazka) will now be updating and signing the Pacman databases more often. This should go smoothly as the GPG keys are already in place and the process has been tested on the new server before it went live.
By the way, the redirect domain msys2.org (no www.) should work more reliably now and HTTPS is now available for it.
2021-01-31 - ASLR enabled by default
About 5 months ago we started backporting patches to our binutils 2.35 to allow enabling ASLR support via various flags. We also enabled these flags in our build system, so any package in our repo that was updated in the last 5 months has ASLR support enabled.
We've now updated to 2.36 which has ASLR enabled by default. Ideally you shouldn't notice any changes, but in case this leads to problems all of it can be disabled/reverted via linker flags:
- mingw64:
-Wl,--disable-dynamicbase,--disable-high-entropy-va,--default-image-base-low
- mingw32:
-Wl,--disable-dynamicbase
Note that this is only a temporary workaround and some of these flags will not be available forever, so you should either fix your code or file a bug in case you suspect a toolchain issue.
Thanks to the binutils developers for improving/fixing ASLR support and to everyone helping on the MSYS2 side of things, especially Jeremy Drake for backporting, upstreaming and fixing bugs exposed by these changes.
Known issues:
- (Fixed now)
In case you are seeing errors such asrelocation truncated to fit: IMAGE_REL_AMD64_REL32 against undefined symbol
try building with-Wl,--default-image-base-low
. Here is the upstream bug report: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26659
2020-12-26 - Zstd exemption for core packages removed
Given it's been months since we began the switch to Zstd for compressing packages, we've now started using it for core packages as well. This means older installations without Zstd support won't be able to cleanly upgrade anymore.
@dmn-star compiled these commands that should update an older installation to support Zstd and unblock futher upgrades:
pacman --noconfirm -U "https://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/libzstd-1.4.4-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz"
pacman --noconfirm -U "https://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/zstd-1.4.4-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz"
pacman --noconfirm -U "https://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/pacman-5.2.1-6-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz"
2020-10-08 - main repo pruned
Due to limited space on the new server and SourceForge file hosting, we are starting to remove older unused packages from the archives. There should still be a 1 year's worth of packages available for downgrades. Mirrors are free to choose whether they want to keep everything or follow the lead.
2020-10-07 - server downtime
From Friday 2nd to Wednesday 10th, the main hosting at repo.msys2.org was down. The server unfortunately completely died and the hosting had to be moved elsewhere. We thank Diablo-D3 for having provided the hardware and hosting. If you notice anything wrong with repo.msys2.org since the move, please tell us.
2020-06-29 - new packagers
Alexey is stepping down from his role as the main packager and two new packagers have been appointed in his place:
- David Macek with signing key 0x9078f532
- Christoph Reiter with signing key 0xa0aa7f57
You can see the keys in full without relying on keyservers in the msys2-keyring GitHub repository.
We have released a new msys2-keyring package from that source (and a new installer that includes them) and we are waiting for a bit before uploading new databases and packages to give people time to update. If you don't update the keyring in time, you'll see something like this:
:: Synchronizing package databases...
downloading mingw32.db...
downloading mingw32.db.sig...
error: mingw32: key "4A6129F4E4B84AE46ED7F635628F528CF3053E04" is unknown
:: Import PGP key 4096R/87771331B3F1FF5263856A6D974C8BE49078F532, "David Macek <david.macek.0@gmail.com>", created: 2018-01-14? [Y/n]
error: mingw32: signature from "David Macek <david.macek.0@gmail.com>" is marginal trust
error: failed to update mingw32 (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))
downloading mingw64.db...
downloading mingw64.db.sig...
error: mingw64: signature from "David Macek <david.macek.0@gmail.com>" is marginal trust
error: failed to update mingw64 (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))
downloading msys.db...
downloading msys.db.sig...
error: msys: signature from "David Macek <david.macek.0@gmail.com>" is marginal trust
error: failed to update msys (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))
error: failed to synchronize all databases
error: mingw32: signature from "David Macek <david.macek.0@gmail.com>" is marginal trust
error: mingw64: signature from "David Macek <david.macek.0@gmail.com>" is marginal trust
error: msys: signature from "David Macek <david.macek.0@gmail.com>" is marginal trust
We have prepared the following steps to verify and install the new keyring
manually after which you should be able to use pacman -Syu
again:
$ curl -O https://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/msys2-keyring-r21.b39fb11-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
$ curl -O https://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/msys2-keyring-r21.b39fb11-1-any.pkg.tar.xz.sig
$ pacman-key --verify msys2-keyring-r21.b39fb11-1-any.pkg.tar.xz.sig
==> Checking msys2-keyring-r21.b39fb11-1-any.pkg.tar.xz.sig... (detached)
gpg: Signature made Mon Jun 29 07:36:14 2020 CEST
gpg: using DSA key AD351C50AE085775EB59333B5F92EFC1A47D45A1
gpg: Good signature from "Alexey Pavlov (Alexpux) <alexpux@gmail.com>" [full]
# pacman -U msys2-keyring-r21.b39fb11-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
If you can't even import the key and the above command fails like this:
error: msys: key "4A6129F4E4B84AE46ED7F635628F528CF3053E04" is unknown
:: Import PGP key 4A6129F4E4B84AE46ED7F635628F528CF3053E04? [Y/n]
[...]
error: database 'msys' is not valid (invalid or corrupted database (PGP signature))
loading packages...
error: failed to prepare transaction (invalid or corrupted database)
... you have to convince pacman to not care about those databases for a while, for example like this:
# pacman -U --config <(echo) msys2-keyring-r21.b39fb11-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
If you still see signature errors, resetting your pacman key store might help:
# rm -r /etc/pacman.d/gnupg/
# pacman-key --init
# pacman-key --populate msys2
2020-06-15 - New base
metapackage; pacman-contrib
is now separate
Following a similar change in Arch Linux, the base
group was replaced with
a base
metapackage. If you installed your MSYS2 using an installer older than
2020-06-02, please run pacman -S base
to get up to date.
This also installs the pacman-contrib
package where updpkgsums
, pactree
etc. now live (previously included in the pacman
package).
Details at #1979, #1976 and #1988.
2020-05-31 - Update may fail with "could not open file"
In case your update process errors out with something similar to
error: could not open file /var/cache/pacman/pkg/zstd-1.4.5-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst: Child process exited with status 127
update pacman separately first:
pacman -Sydd pacman
This issue is caused by a pacman version that is too old and can't handle newer packages compressed with zstd. In case you are seeing this problem in CI consider using a newer base which contains a newer pacman which supports zstd: https://github.com/msys2/msys2-installer/releases
2020-05-22 - MSYS2 may fail to start after a msys2-runtime upgrade
MSYS2 programs will fail to start if programs started before the update are still running in the background (especially sshd, dirmngr, gpg-agent, bash, pacman and mintty). You can stop them by running the following in a Windows terminal:
taskkill /f /fi "MODULES eq msys-2.0.dll"
If that fails, try a reboot.
We've improved our update process so this shouldn't happen again with future updates.
2020-05-22 - Pacman may fail to install packages with Unrecognized archive format
For a while, the core packages were prematurely packaged using zstd without giving users time to update to zstd-enabled pacman first. This should be resolved now.
2020-05-17 - 32-bit MSYS2 no longer actively supported
32-bit mingw-w64 packages are still supported, this is about the POSIX emulation layer, i.e. the runtime, Bash, MinTTY...
After this date, we don't plan on building updated msys-i686 packages nor releasing i686 installers anymore. This is due to increasingly frustrating difficulties with limited 32-bit address space, high penetration of 64-bit systems and Cygwin (our upstream) starting their way to drop 32-bit support as well.
2019-06-03 - mingw-w64 Ada and ObjC unsupported until further notice
Pacman may say this when updating:
looking for conflicting packages...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: installing mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc (9.1.0-1) breaks dependency 'mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc=8.3.0-2' required by mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-ada
:: installing mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc (9.1.0-1) breaks dependency 'mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc=8.3.0-2' required by mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-objc
:: installing mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc (9.1.0-1) breaks dependency 'mingw-w64-i686-gcc=8.3.0-2' required by mingw-w64-i686-gcc-ada
:: installing mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc (9.1.0-1) breaks dependency 'mingw-w64-i686-gcc=8.3.0-2' required by mingw-w64-i686-gcc-objc
Ada and ObjC are currently unsupported in MSYS2 builds due to long-standing
issues with the i686 variant. Run
pacman -R mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-ada mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-objc
and/or
pacman -R mingw-w64-i686-gcc-ada mingw-w64-i686-gcc-objc
, then update.
2016 - Core update integrated into Pacman; update-core
removed
The function of update-core
is transferred to pacman -Syuu
.
2016 - Command window may linger after startup
Change the argument /K
to /C
in all three Start menu shortcuts.