Add MSYS2 to Windows

[kaylangan]

Tool information

• Tool name: MSYS2
• Add or update? Add
• Desired version: Latest
• Approximate size:
• If this is an add request:
  • Brief description of tool: Providing MSYS2 instead of MinGW would enable a way easier package management for MinGW (via Pacman) and also faster builds.
  • URL for tool's homepage: https://www.msys2.org/

Virtual environments affected

• macOS 10.14
• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• Windows Server 2016 R2
• Windows Server 2019

Can this tool be installed during the build?
Yes, via choco install msys2.

Are you willing to submit a PR?

[eine]

Ref actions/starter-workflows#95 (/cc @krcroft @andymckay)

Ref numworks/setup-msys2 1138-4EB/setup-msys2 (/cc @Ecco)

[eine]

I suggest to download and extract the available MSYS2 tarball, instead of using chocolatey. This is because chocolatey requires ~5min but the tarball is extracted in 30s. Please, see
actions/toolkit#165 (comment) for other references related to current workarounds for this issue.

[rgl]

@eine that time difference is probably because one is updating the base tarball binaries and the other is not.

[eine]

@rgl, although it might be the case, I don't think it is the only reason. Precisely, an option is available in setup-msys2 which allows to not only extract the tarball, but also execute pacman -Syu. Extraction time is ~40s (https://github.com/numworks/setup-msys2/runs/348237664) and extraction plus update requires ~70s (https://github.com/numworks/setup-msys2/runs/348238118). Conversely, choco install msys2 takes 270s (https://github.com/eine/ghdl-packaging/commit/069ae680c38a1832950a377618dc4a1798d6ccf3/checks?check_suite_id=231637124) at least.

Nevertheless, I think that installation time is not revelant in this specific request. Chocolatey package mingw is outdated (frozen to say the least) and msys2 should be installed instead. It is not reasonable to expect users to install MSYS2 through an action (which is already available), because it has many limitations. Provided that a proper MSYS2 installation is included in windows-latest, I don't really care how GitHub decides to do it.

[MSP-Greg]

The base MSYS2 install is mostly just command line tools, which are very similar to the tools provided with Git for Windows.

I think most users are looking for the main install along with the groups 'base' and 'base-devel', and probably mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc and mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake. Since the tarballs are not updated frequently, pacman -Syu should be done at some point.

Beyond that, packages like OpenSSL, libyaml, etc, but they can installed in the workflows...

[dreamer]

I think most users are looking for the main install along with the groups 'base' and 'base-devel', and probably mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc and mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake.

There's no reason to presume that. We are using MSYS2 to test Windows compilation of our project using GCC and Clang (in parallel to MSVC) and depend on following packages: pkg-config libtool libpng zlib ncurses SDL2 SDL2_net opusfile autogen autoconf automake-wrapper.