MSYS2 Notes

Page for things that pop up while fiddling with MSys2.

PS1 script

I had to replace PS1="$PS1"'\n' with PS1="$PS1"$'\n' within the profile file to get the git prompt working. See also this msys2 ticket page

Debugging the environment conversion to UTF-8

When trying to debug environment issues, it can be very helpful to print out the environment as it comes into Git. Unfortunately, mingw_startup() – which converts the environment to UTF-8 – is run so early that the sprintf() family of functions does not work: the locale has not been initialized yet (because this would require the environment, using the LC_ALL environment variable!). Therefore, something like this is required:

#include <strsafe.h>
...
{
  char buffer[1024];
  StringCbPrintf(buffer, sizeof(buffer), "env %d is '%s'\n", i, environ[i]);
  write(2, buffer, strlen(buffer));
}

Changing the colors in the Terminal

See https://github.com/mavnn/mintty-colors-solarized

Building the git documentation

• pacman -S asciidoc xmlto
• start a msys shell
• make doc

In a mingw32 shell asciidoc fails with

../git/Documentation$ asciidoc git-annotate.txt
asciidoc: FAILED: configuration file asciidoc.conf missing

Openssh

Complains about world writeable private key files, although that makes no sense on windows. Can be fixed with

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/*