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Package management
Modern software development relies heavily on a way to manage dependencies, i.e. to keep track of required software libraries and their versions. Examples are apt
for Linux, homebrew
for macOS, maven
for Java and pip
for Python.
Git for Windows is based on MSYS2 which bundles the Pacman tool (known from Arch Linux) for dependency management.
There is a man
page for pacman
and the tool also sports a --help
option. These resources are recommended to address questions not covered by the following, brief descriptions.
To install a package, run
pacman -S <package-name>
To ensure that the newest package version is installed, it is recommended to pass the -y
option, too, which asks Pacman to download the newest package list:
pacman -Sy <package-name>
To upgrade all packages to their newest versions, call
pacman -Syu
As pacman.exe
is itself an MSYS2 executable, it is strongly suggested to update msys2-runtime
, bash
and pacman
packages separately from other packages if they need to be updated, and let pacman
quit immediately afterwards.
Likewise, if you run pacman
from a bash
-- an MSYS2 program, too -- you should quit the shell immediately (it might show an infinite stream of heap messages instead of quitting, requiring to be force-quit).
pacman -R <package-name>
To list the installed packages, call
pacman -Q
To list the contents of a package, call
pacman -Ql <package-name>
To find out what package a file belongs to, call
pacman -Qo <file-name>
If you want to rebuild a package, the first order of business is to know which repository has the metadata for the package. Git for Windows has three repositories containing such metadata:
-
build-extra contains the
mingw-w64-git-extra
package information, -
MINGW-packages contains the information for the MINGW packages, i.e. packages that do not require any POSIX emulation; by convention, their package name have the
mingw-w64-
prefix, and -
MSYS2-packages contains the information for all packages that require a POSIX emulation, such as Bash, OpenSSH, etc. The
MSYS2-packages
repository also contains the information of the package providing the POSIX emulation:msys2-runtime
(see also Building msys2-runtime).
To build MINGW packages, start a shell (a MINGW shell is recommended), clone the MINGW-packages
repository (recommended location: /usr/src/MINGW-packages
), cd
to the appropriate subdirectory and call
makepkg-mingw -s
(The -s
flag tells makepkg
that it should install dependencies automatically as needed.)
To build MSYS packages, start a shell (the MSYS shell is recommended), clone the MSYS2-packages
repository (recommended location: /usr/src/MSYS2-packages
), cd
to the appropriate subdirectory and call
makepkg -s
If you have modified any source files you need to update the checksums using the updpkgsums
command before running makepkg
or makepkg-mingw
.
Note: Before building the first package, as per MSYS2's own documentation you need to install the development packages for development:
pacman -Sy base-devel msys2-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-i686-toolchain
When testing Pull Requests or debugging certain issues, it is convenient to build packages from source code other than the canonical one listed in the PKGBUILD
file. This can be achieved by switching to the subdirectory of /usr/src/MINGW-packages
or /usr/src/MSYS2-packages
, respectively, corresponding to the package you want to build, ensure that the src/
directory is populated (and call makepkg-mingw --nobuild -s
or makepkg --nobuild -s
otherwise), then patch the source code in the src/
subdirectory and after that call
makepkg-mingw --noextract --noprepare
or
makepkg --noextract --noprepare
to build the package.
The makepkg
script is part of the pacman
package itself. It expects a PKGBUILD
file in the current directory that contains metadata about the package and functions specifying how to prepare the source code, build the executables, and package all the files.
Perl packages are managed outside of the pacman
realm, but instead with CPAN:
perl -MCPAN -e 'install <package-name>'
CPAN also offers an interactive shell:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
Pacman repositories are served via HTTP, as static files in a single directory. The most important file in that directory is the package index, called <name>.db.tar.xz
by convention. This package index can be updated via repo-add <package-index> <package-file>...
(this updated only the package index, it does not copy the package files into the same directory). Pacman expects to find the package files referenced in the package index in the same directory as the index.
The Git for Windows-specific packages are served by Azure Blob Storage, see below. We ship MSYS2 and MINGW packages for two architectures, i686
and x86_64
. Pacman is configured to use these in /etc/pacman.conf
.