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okanatyesterday at 3:55 PM3 repliesview on HN

MSYS2 is repacked Cygwin though. It is literally the same codebase compiled with slightly different flags. You need a full Unix environment for Bash to run, not just Mingw toolchain. The difference is Cygwin aims to create a full Unix system while MSYS2 just enough development environment to run bash, make etc to build native Windows programs with Mingw.

Git installs its own Mingw and Msys2 stuff but mostly compiled for a Mingw environment so they consume Windows paths natively instead of using MSYS2/Cygwin path conversion. That's why when you have mixed PATH variable all hell breaks loose with Git.


Replies

delta_p_delta_xyesterday at 4:14 PM

> MSYS2 just enough development environment

Doesn't it come with `pacman` too?

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1718627440yesterday at 7:31 PM

A repacked Cygwin is one environment, but the default uses the UCRT from Microsoft.

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michaelsbradleyyesterday at 4:39 PM

I think you’re underestimating or discounting the work the MSYS2 team put into their layered environments mechanism:

https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/

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