As far as I know, MYS2 has three flavours of shell.
There is the regular MSYS2 shell
There is a 32bit mingw shell
There is a 64bit mingw shell
It seems to me that the main difference between these shells is the version
of GCC which you get.
To see this, open the MSYS2 shell and type gcc -v
You will see "Target: x86_64-pc-msys" - programs built using this shell
(and gcc) are meant to run from the MSYS2 shell/environment. So you use
this compiler to build MSYS2 related tools etc.
If you open the mingw 32bit or 64bit shell and type gcc -v you get "Target:
i686-w64-mingw32" and "Target: x86_64-w64-mingw32" respectively.
Programs built from these shells (and compilers) can be run outside of the
MSYS2 environment, eg. they could run on a computer without MSYS2 installed
(I think, don't quote me!). So the intent here is to use the mingw shells
to build native windows applications with gcc.
More information here but IMO the wiki page is not written in a very
beginner friendly way, and it seems that it isn't even very obvious to new
users that they need to know this important information :)
https://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20introduction/
- Wayne
On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 9:57 AM, Ray Donnelly <mingw.andr...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 10:16 PM, Fabrice Popineau
> <fabrice.popin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > What is the purpose of these 2 executables ?
> > What do they bring over the msys2_shell.cmd script ?
> > My installation did not get them by a pacman update so I was a bit
> > surprised when I heard of them.
> > I see them now because I have downloaded the latest installer
> > and tried a new installation.
>
> They allow pinning to the Start Menu and Task Bar, that is the main
> advantage from my perspective.
>
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Fabrice
> >
> >
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