Updating your SDK

Extract from the Git for Windows SDK release page. Note the Caution parts!

The SDK 'net installer'

The SDK 'net installer' is a self-extracting archive containing a minimal set of files needed to bootstrap an entire development environment to compile and run Git for Windows.

When run as executable, it automatically runs setup-git-sdk.bat after extracting the files. Users who prefer to unpack the archive manually with 7-Zip need to run that batch file manually, too. The script is extensively commented to assist in understanding the installation process and issues.

The files contained in the net installer are parts of MSys2's 'msys2-runtime', 'pacman' and 'gnupg' packages, carefully selected to keep the size of the installer small yet still allowing to use the Pacman package manager to initialize a full-fledged MSys2 environment plus Git for Windows' packages.

The bootstrap script needs to force-install the packages because the net installer comes without any package information and Pacman would therefore refuse to overwrite the files from above-mentioned packages.

To keep the development environment up-to-date

To keep the development environment up-to-date, developers need to run

update-core
# If core-packages are updated during that call you MUST restart MSys2
pacman -Syu

from time to time.

Caution (update-core)

Core packages like the msys2-runtime, bash or pacman itself should be updated via the pacman update-core script. Because those core packages are linked to the msys2-runtime (and each other), and updating the runtime "in flight" results most often in heap corruption as far as MSys2 is concerned.

Alternative Method

An alternative method is to start git-cmd.exe and run pacman -Sy <package> for msys2-runtime, bash and pacman as needed, because that ensures that no obsolete binary continues to be used after the update.

See Also:

• G4W Package Management
• pacman man page
• PKGBuild man page
• makepkg man page
• ArchLinux articles - Creating Packages and PKGBuild
• MSYS2 Introduction & Contributing
• SDK's setup-git-sdk.bat script
• pacman's core-update script

Origin of 'net installer' concept

The idea for the 'net installer' originated in the Git for Windows project when it was still based on MSys 1.x. At that time, MSys 1.x did not have a package manager, therefore the original net installer (ab-)used Git as a package manager.

Since the new net installer no longer needs to ship with Git (instead using Pacman to install the mingw-w64-git package that is current at the time the net installer is launched), its versions are no longer tightly coupled to the Git version.