I thought I would just put this out there because its a problem I have had to just resolve.
When I started creating my VCV modules I followed the environment setup docs and installed Msys2 on my windows machine, but didn’t really read much about it, the installation was fairly straight forward and it just worked for me.
So I didn’t know that you are supposed to regularly update the installation, to quote the website:
MSYS2 is a rolling release distribution and only supports full system upgrades, which means there are frequent minor and major updates to various packages and you can only update all packages at once.
I have just been wrestling with my Python installation due to requiring a specific version for a different project, and I had a windows installed version, and chocolatey installed version, and an msys2 installed version, all in my PATH…
Uninstalling or updating the windows and chocolatey versions was simple enough, but because my msys2 was nearly 2 years out of date I ran into some big issues.
Anyway, regardless of my issues, if you are using msys2, don’t forget to update it regularly
Under the section Updating MSYS2 - MSYS2 about maintenance tasks, it states that you should use paccache -r to prune the package cache. The problem I had, is that paccache isn’t installed by default. The best way is to use pacman -Scc where you’re given the choice whether to perform the action or not.
Another thing one can do is to use pacman -Qdt to find orphaned dependencies, which you can then remove with pacman -R package-name
Because I’m slightly OCD about latest versions, you can remove the MSYS2 GDB package and install the mingw-w64-x86_64-gdb one which will give you the latest version: MSYS2 is currently v12, MinGW is v13. You can find what packages you have as a list with pacman -Qqe
Thank you for sharing your experience and advising others to keep their MSYS2 installation up to date. It is critical to maintaining your software up to date in order to get the most recent features, security upgrades, and bug patches. As you noted, rolling release distributions like MSYS2 frequently require regular updates, and it’s easy to ignore this if you’re not aware of it or if the updates don’t happen automatically. To guarantee a seamless updating process, check for updates on a frequent basis and follow any instructions supplied by the program provider.
