winget install msys2

I was hoping to be able to do a winget install msys2, but winget search mysys2 came up empty.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/package/repository https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs

[mingwandroid]

Thanks! Maybe people can use it to build and host/use their own packages?

Since you took the time to do the work I feel I owe you at least my thinking on these external 3rd-party packaging systems and why we’re not generally supportive of them.

MSYS2 has been added to Chocolatey (against my preference, but not my explicit wish).

I would suggest making a PR with winget if you care about this. I’d personally rather you didn’t but I cannot stop you, just try to advise. AFAIK though, making a PR there is the way to get packages into winget. You’d not be able to claim much of it as your own work, only the packaging scripts, but at the same time, if you claim it as our work, then people might expect support from us. Support is far from free even when there’s no monetary transactions involved. It takes time and care and can be draining sometimes.

Then there are concerns about ownership and trust. I don’t know if someone could someday get control of this winget recipe and put something malicious into it outside of our control thus damaging our reputation. While unlikely this is not impossible.

We already have a good package manager on Windows; IMHO we have the 2nd best package manager in the world on Windows (pacman, the best, but I am biased, being conda).

I do not think we have much interest in maintaining this kind of thing. It promotes other package managers and may give, to some people, an indication that this software is somehow compatible with oither winget-gotten software which is not true and definitely something we cannot guarantee (whereas we can inside MSYS2 to a much larger extent).

From my perspective, if the question ever needs to be asked “How did you install MSYS2?” when helping diagnose a problem, and the response is that they used some 3rd party installer then we’ve failed. To me, it doesn’t matter if this 3rd party installer currently routes through one of our installers (as this winget proposal does) or not. While true at present someone might change it later and any flexibility our installers provide is hidden behind winget’s APIs.

So winget, vcxproj, chocolately, julia, whoever else, are free to make use of our work and add ways to install our stuff that feels more ‘native’ to them, but they’ll never feel native to MSYS2. That’s not to do with us though. We make our own installers and would rather focus on improving those.

[Biswa96]

First, the name is MSYS2. Second, why do you need Microsoft’s winget to install msys2? MSYS2 already provides an installer, here https://github.com/msys2/msys2-installer/releases