msys2 64 bit: help help!

[Phyx]

Hi Simon, Andrey


> > 3. After this step, starting a shell failed altogether with
> "c:/msys64/mingw64_shell.bat is
> > not recognised as an internal or external command". And sure enough,
> there is no such file.
> > Presumably it existed in step 1.  So perhaps step 2 deleted it?
> > [...]
> > 4. As you mention, I then tried msys2_shell.cmd.  It worked -- with a
> noticeable delay of 5
> > seconds or so.
>
> I've also just got a new Win10 laptop and had the same issue with missing
> mingw64_shell.bat during msys2 install. I solved it by creating mingw64.bat
> with the following contents:
>
> msys2_shell.cmd -mingw64 -mintty
>
> I deleted all old shortcuts and use this script instead. Everything seems
> to work fine -- can build GHC.
>
>
Yes this is correct, the msys2 team has decided to "streamline" all their
different batch files to launch msys from 4 to 1, hence the only remaining
one is msys2_shell.cmd which accepts arguments of which shell to open and
using which console host.

Unfortunately this is done via their upgrade-core script and doesn't know
how to remove the installer shortcuts, so you end up with dead shortcuts.

> 1.  I just left the machine for 10-15 mins and lo! the shell windows
opened up. It just took a loooong time.
>
> At this point, starting a new shell no longer took a long time.  It all
seemed to be working.

First launch should be finishing setting up the environment so will take
slightly longer, but shouldn't have taken that long. Could this be AV
related?
I always add an exception to the AV (or the build in windows defender) for
the msys2 folder to prevent it from scanning files continuously. Especially
building GHC this can slow things down considerably depending on the AV.


> 2.  I then ran pacman -Syuu as instructed on the installation page:
https://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/
>
> The log of what happened is below.  There are numerous failures involving
Cygwin, which I do not have installed, at least not so far as I know.   I
do not know if these failures matter.

These instructions are basically telling it to upgrade the world. They are
however a bit wrong, https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/373

msys2 is derived from Cygwin so it inherits much of the problems of Cygwin.
The msys2 runtime is the Cygwin runtime with patches added which is why the
errors mention Cygwin.

The issue is that the msys2-runtime has been upgraded by "pacman -Syuu" at
which point a new "Cygwin" dll has been downloaded. However all
Cygwin/msys2 runtimes share the same
address space and thus you can't have multiple versions of the same runtime
loaded at once. This is why subsequent calls to anything relying on the
msys2 runtime will fail with a weird
fork error. The solution is to just close all open msys2 window and re-open.

Our own instructions page
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Preparation/Windows breaks
this down in a few steps to avoid this issue. 1) first update the packages
and 2) only after that update the msys-core files.
But you will still need to restart the shell.

> * should I worry about all those install errs


No they're perfectly fine and expected. I would however re-run the pacman
-Syu to make sure all packages were updated, now that the runtime has been
updated already it shouldn't be updated again

and you shouldn't see any fork errors.


> * how can I debug what's happening with

>  that long delay


If it's only startup and not executing of other commands or bash completion
then my bet would be AV software. If bash completion is slow or commands
like ls as well

you may be hitting a long standing issue some computers have in which the
domain controller is being hit for every invocation of commands, causing a
slowdown https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages/issues/138 , Solution 2
from https://gist.github.com/k-takata/9b8d143f0f3fef5abdab seems to fix it
for most people.


* Should I nuke the start menu shortcuts that

  the msys64 installer so carefully installed

  in favour of msys2_shell.cmd?


Yes, these are now dead. you need to use msys2_shell.cmd but also pass
it -mingw64
so it knows what shell to start. mintty is supposed to be the default, but
in case that changes you can also pass it -mintty as well to be sure it
doesn't change.



I am working on a script to automate this setup, hopefully that would make
it easier next time!


Cheers,

Tamar
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