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.

How to use pacman

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.

Install/upgrade packages

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

Updating msys2-runtime, pacman and bash

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).

Remove packages

pacman -R <package-name>

List packages

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>

Technical details

Rebuild packages

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 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, you need to start the MSYS shell, 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, you need to start the MSYS shell, 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

Build packages from locally-patched sources

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.

More details about rebuilding packages

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 package management

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

Repository structure

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.