that’s what I’m doing. I used to update msys2 every day. Now I never do.
I have it up to date (though the updates I’ve seen are nothing to write home about) and Rack builds fine… as long as I don’t nuke the deps.
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Yeah I literally saved the built deps to a zip in case I needed them at a future point. Heck, I even saved the whole Rack build to a zip. I’m not running into this issue again.
I still think never ever updating is the easiest solution to this awful problem.
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Windows 11 in a nutshell
well, yes and no. This is just straight up bug in VCV. I should have said “never updating mingw” is my solution.
I get what you mean, yeah. The joke is that so many issues come from updates. Just look at the Crowdstrike outages we have today.
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The issue isn’t so much updates per se; but the lack of QC/testing for them.
For example, AFAIK, Microsoft got rid of their Windows testers, relying on employees building the product (biased) and the so-called Windows Insiders (not really useful). Hubris.
well, as someone whose day job is making software that is updated every day I can say you either have to pay more to make software that was, or you have to have quality issues.
I agree completely, however, in Ms’ case, a friend of mine used to work for them… when their quality wasn’t tanking. Pay wasn’t an issue, at least for programmers; but everybody makes mistakes, particularly in such large code bases, thing is having someone to catch them and report them (and leaders humble enough to actually acknowledge user needs… that also seems to be a problem in Ms’ case).
I posted on the discord:
“Is there an update planned to VCV so that the deps will build on windows with the current version of gcc / MSYS2? Or maybe that’s already been fixed?”
Deafening silence. I guess VCV has no plans to make their deps build on windows? Strange, but I guess it’s their choice to make…
Ah 
Not that we expected any different; but I tried building them with the latest 14.2.0-1 MSYS GCC and they still fail when it’s curl’s turn.
ah, that’s too bad. tx for checking.
@Vortico was asking about this on Discord. I said @Bloodbat knows more about this. If you feel like it you could go over there. It’s in the VCV development section (or channel, or whatever you call stuff over there).
I chimed in and now I feel like a T-800, what with the place questioning my humanity with every f…oggy thing I try to do. (Do people actually enjoy that?)
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No, I don’t think they do. I find it horrible.(If you are talking about the Discord phenomenon)
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Yep… looks a bit like IRC… only… asynchronous, awful and extremely naggy.
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Edit: see next post for a solution that patches Rack and allows using GCC 14.
After deciding the best course of action for most users is to downgrade GCC, I made a couple of scripts to take the pain out of accomplishing that and, also, optionally, allow updating of other packages.
They can be found at:
The instructions are in the readme.
I hope people struggling with building Rack for Windows find them useful.
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The final chapter (at least for me) in the saga…
After an sleepless; but seemingly productive night… I came up with another solution: really dive into the old curl Rack wants and patch the damn thing, so… I did. Apparently this has happened to curl before in other platforms, so it may or may not bite Rack for other architectures in the future.
Believe it or not, the problem stems from 3 lines spread across different files.
So… I made a new msysbuildfix branch… nuked my deps and… Rack builds with MSYS’ GCC 14.
This solution doesn’t update Rack’s dependencies (for better and worse). It just patches curl; it should be compatible with Linux and Mac as well (it should leave curl for those untouched).
It has been tested by nullset (Thanks a whole lot 
).
This solution requires patch (install with pacman -Syu patch).
After installing patch, clone my msysbuildbranch here:
build the deps and Rack as per the instructions in the Rack manual.
The few changes can be compared here:
This leaves a few options for builders: downgrade manually or using the scripts mentioned in the post above; build from my msysbuildbranch or patch curl manually (probably the least attractive, believe me), so I hope people can enjoy building Rack for Windows again.
Now I leave this saga and go back to the electric meditation chamber in Sanguine Labs.
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FYI,
With 2.6.0 pre-release (git commit 4a7ad1e), Rack again builds in msys2.
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