This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive tutorial on everything you can do with mingw-get but rather a place for me to document some tips that I found Googling and felt I should consolidate here. If something here does not work for you or if you have some other useful pointers let me know and I’ll update this post.
MinGW is standard equipment on any new Windows computer I need to use which includes most of the tools I use regularly. I had a need to create zip files recently however zip and unzip are not included in the base MinGW installation. The easiest way to install these utilities is through mingw-get.
$ mingw-get install msys-zip $ mingw-get install msys-unzip
This lead me to the question, what additional packages are actually available this way? Cygwin provides a nice GUI to pick and choose packages and of course there are the various package managers available for the many Linux distros. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to list packages that can be installed with mingw-get. One method I found is to look in the catalog file.
$ grep "package name" /mingw/var/lib/mingw-get/data/*.xml
Or to make the output a little nicer:
$ grep "package name=" /mingw/var/lib/mingw-get/data/*.xml |
sed 's/.*package name="\([^"]*\)".*/\1/'
These commands will show you all the packages available whether they are already installed or not. To list packages that are already installed there is a nifty little script that can be found here. Download mingw-get-info and copy it to /mingw/bin.
$ mingw-get-info installed
This script is not an official MinGW tool and seems to only exist as an attachment to the linked bug report. From the comments on that page the script will generate a number of reports:
$ mingw-get-info all
to see current status for all available packages,
$ mingw-get-info installed
to filter on only those packages which are installed locally, or
$ mingw-get-info index
to see an index for the repository catalogue.