Hi Eduard (and all),
Some comments on my first tests with MSYS2 on Windows 7 (64-bit): * MSYS2 is about as easy as MSYS to configure and use, so no bad surprise. From a user's point of view, the only drawback is the automatic mapping between the Windows username and the MSYS2 account (with MSYS, you can choose a different name).
* I installed the 64-bit version, with both the 32 and 64-bit packages (installed via the msys2installdeps.sh script). Note that due to a quite slow Internet connection, I had to launch the script 3 or 4 times (some packages took too long to download and failed in timeout). * The imagemagick-6 packages and the additional Python packages (in the pip install section) were not automatically installed by the script, and I had to add them manually. Probably my fault though, because I launched MSYS2 with the msys2 command, not the mingw32 or ming64 ones (and thus the platform specific folder was not in the path). Could be interesting to document it in the wiki page. * Bzr needs ssh to work correctly (with default settings). It works perfectly with the Openssh package, but I read other users used the Putty package or some Python modules.
* Inkscape trunk 64-bit compilation (with cmake and ninja) works perfectly. The application looks a bit weird with Gtk3 on Windows (If I remember correctly, the UI elements were significantly smaller with my previous Gtk3 tests), but not that bad. And I see no obvious regression with the basic features for now.
* I first tried to compile with gtest installed, but as it failed I removed the folder without investigating. Please tell me if it's expected to work or not.
I'll try to find time this week to test 32-bit building on my 64-bit computer. Probably something to tweak somewhere to make it work (clues are welcome!). Another MSYS2 (32-bit version) is in progress so that I can test it with an old Windows XP computer later (yes, I'm also forced to use one from time to time...).
Thanks for your help, Eduard, MSYS2 looks very promising!
Regards, -- Nicolas