How to setup an MSYS2 building environment

[El Heggunte]

This guide will show you how to setup an MSYS2 building environment for compiling free & open-source software such as Lame, twolame, x264, x265, Xvid, MP4Box, Flac, ffmpeg, Libav, MPlayer & MEncoder, and even GCC itself.

1) First, download one of the .tar.xz archives from the URL below. The i686 packages are mandatory only if your edition of Windows is a 32-bit one.

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/cvuxy5n5n55uf/MSYS2-BASE

2) Open the archive with 7-Zip, WinRAR or something else and extract the folder "msys32" or "msys64" to the root directory of an HDD (C:\, D:\, R:\, X:\, etc). You can rename "msys##" to, for example, MSYS2Win32 or MSYS2Win64 if you think the original name is rather unimaginative

3) Next, download one of the GCC packages from this Mediafire folder:

https://www.mediafire.com/?monckp1a1ebql

then copy the contents of the 32-bit folder to MSYS2dir\mingw32 and the contents of the 64-bit folder to MSYS2dir\mingw64.

4) Download a CMake .zip for Windows from https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases , create the folder MSYSdir\CMAKE and extract the contents of "cmake-version_number-win##-x##" into CMAKE.

5) Download a GIT .cab from http://www.mediafire.com/file/te9b9zefxeulffw/PortableGit-2.22.0-32-bit.cab/file or from http://www.mediafire.com/file/1meouth27ygbtyt/PortableGit-2.22.0-64-bit.cab/file , create the folder MSYS2dir\GIT, copy the contents of "git" into GIT.

6) Download a Mercurial .7z from https://www.mediafire.com/?n45r875sobxd9 , create the folder MSYS2dir\HG, extract the folders and files from "Mercurial-version_number-x##" into HG.

7) Download the file http://www.mediafire.com/file/xu57p87vvk9kfuu/commons.7z/file and extract the folder "commons" into MSYS2dir.

8) Create the start-menu or/and desktop shortcuts to MSYS2dir\msys2.exe, mingw32.exe and mingw64.exe.

9) Now, goto MSYS2dir\msys2.exe and double-click it. A CLI window will pop-up, will do "some things", and then will close itself (but if it doesn't, just close it).

10) Run msys2.exe again and improve the MSYS2 interface by clicking on the window with the right-button of the mouse. Unless you are a dork who has eagle eyes or/and an 80-inch monitor, you really need to get rid of MSYS2's stupid default settings ; change the text size, the text color, the display font, the background color, the behavior of the mouse buttons, etc, according to your preferences. Close the window again, either through the close button or by typing "exit" and pressing ENTER.

11) Time to edit the file etc\fstab. Open it with any text editor that can deal with UNIX text files — Notepad.exe cannot, but Notepad++, TextPad, EditPlus, EditPad, EmEditor and etcetera can. Set the correct path values to the mingw32 and mingw64 "variables". For example,

C:/MSYS2Win32/mingw32       /mingw32
C:/MSYS2Win32/mingw64       /mingw64

Edit the file, save the file, close the editor.

12) Time to edit the file home\YourUsername\.bash_profile.
Add the lines below:

export PS1='[\w]\n<$MSYSTEM> '

PATH=/commons:/CMAKE/bin:/GIT/bin:/HG:$PATH
export PATH

13) The final step: open msys2.exe again and run the following commands:

pacman -S make

pacman -S automake

pacman -S autoconf

pacman -S libtool

pacman -S m4

pacman -S gettext

pacman -S pkg-config

pacman -S findutils

pacman -S patch

pacman -S svn

pacman -S zip

pacman -S p7zip

pacman -S bison

pacman -S gettext-devel

pacman -S sshpass

pacman -S texinfo

pacman -S cvs

pacman -S man

pacman -S zlib-devel

That's all for now.

[El Heggunte]

[reserved]

[El Heggunte]

This is an overdue post...

Since the goode olde days of MSYS1 , GCC for Windows normally uses pthreads-w32, which has been sufficient and adequate for building well-known free&open-source software such as x264, x265, lame, twolame, xvid, fdkaac, ffmbc, etc.
But because the current maintainer of tsMuxeR is not as smart as he thinks , now the program created by Roman/physic requires a posix-threaded edition of GCC, which uses winpthreads instead of pthreads-w32.

So if you want to compile the new tsMuxeR on Windows, you must temporarily (or permanently, who knows) replace the Windows-threaded GCC with a posix-threaded one,
and then you have these choices:

1) download this winpthreaded GCC 9.2.0 package from Mediafire: http://www.mediafire.com/file/bxfldr9egepm14r/GCC-9.2.0-posix-winpthreads.rar/file

OR

2) use the following command-lines in the MSYS2 prompt and get only what is absolutely necessary:

a)

pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-binutils mingw-w64-i686-crt-git mingw-w64-i686-gcc mingw-w64-i686-gcc-libs mingw-w64-i686-headers-git mingw-w64-i686-libwinpthread-git mingw-w64-i686-tools-git mingw-w64-i686-winpthreads-git

b)

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-binutils mingw-w64-x86_64-crt-git mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-libs mingw-w64-x86_64-headers-git mingw-w64-x86_64-libwinpthread-git mingw-w64-x86_64-tools-git mingw-w64-x86_64-winpthreads-git

NOTICE — in the archive that I uploaded to Mediafire the main .EXEs were compressed with UPX so that they "don't eat" too much disk space.

[El Heggunte]

OVERDUE UPDATE:

The MSYS2 repositories at sourceforge dot net are dead -_-
so I replaced those two old URLs in the first post with a link to a new directory at MediaFire.