Skip to content

News

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:

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 http://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/msys2-keyring-r21.b39fb11-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
$ curl -O http://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.