Crate request: msys2

community
1

Hello, there're crates like curl-sys whose successful build relies on successful run of configure, which means on Windows and with the gnu target we'll need to get sh.exe and other Unix-style tools to build it successfully. That means that they will normally fail to build under Windows command prompt, (but usually they're built fine under MSYS2 MINGW64 shells).

I'd imagine a crate called msys2, so other build.rs scripts can use it to automatically download and install msys2 tools, specify prerequisites so it can automatically install them with pacman, or run a command within the msys2 environment. I wonder if the community are willing to create and maintain such a crate though. But it would definitely be helpful! Thanks.

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I know on debian it's frowned upon for an installer to download other software and install it. Likewise, I could quite easily see how a Windows user wanting to build some foo crate (which transitively depends on msys2) may be a bit upset if that also installs a bunch of stuff on their system without their explicit permission.

That said, I reckon it sounds like an awesome idea! It's kinda annoying when you need to manually install a bunch of prerequisites just to use a library. I'm happy to do it on Linux because that level of control is half the reason I use the OS (and in particular Arch Linux), but I assume Windows users will expect things to Just Work.