Cannot upgrade old msys2 because all packages are in zstd format

[gabrielschulhof]

Hey, all!

I'm trying to

pacman -Syuu

to update everything, but I'm finding myself in a chicken-and-egg scenario where I cannot upgrade because all packages are in zst format, and so is the zstd package. Is there an old version of the zstd package that's stored in a format that old pacman can recognize?

[mingwandroid]

Can you try to follow the instructions at: https://www.msys2.org/wiki/MSYS2-reinstallation/

[intvsteve]

Unfortunately I started following instructions here. Now I get this:

$ pacman

That's it. Zero. Nada. Nothing. No output whatsoever. The last entries in the log are from these steps:

pacman --noconfirm -U "http://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/libzstd-1.4.4-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz"
pacman --noconfirm -U "http://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/zstd-1.4.4-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz"
pacman --noconfirm -U "http://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/pacman-5.2.1-6-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz"

I know that I'd done some of the later steps listed on the News page already in order to get the keys / trust issues resolved.

[mmottaghi]

I faced the same problem, and resolved it as described below:

Simply replace the existing msys2 installation with a new archive:

1. Let us assume your current msys2 installation folder is c:\msys64.
2. Rename c:\msys64 to c:\msys64-old
3. Download http://repo.msys2.org/distrib/x86_64/msys2-base-x86_64-20210228.tar.xz and call it newm.tar.xz
4. Unzip newm.tar.xz at c:\msys64
5. In a CMD terminal, run: c:\msys64\msys2_shell.cmd -defterm -no-start -use-full-path -c "pwd"

At step 5 all the necessary changes will be automatically made for you, and now you can install any package you want using the fresh pacman.

[intvsteve]

Thanks, @mmottaghi - but I must be missing something. Does this imply that I must rediscover (manually) and reinstall all the packages and rebuild my entire msys2 environment? My goal was to not start over from scratch if possible.

[mmottaghi]

You can automatically reinstall all your existing packages.

1. Obtain a list of your current packages pacman -Qqe | xargs echo > /c/packages.txt ; exit
2. Reinstall msys2 (follow the 5 steps that I listed above).
3. Use the list in step 1 to automatically re-install all the packages you had before: pacman -S --needed $(cat /c/packages.txt)

[intvsteve]

Therein lies the problem. In the old install, pacman -Qqe produces no output of any kind. In the new install, it only shows bash.

Update: At this point, it is moot. I have reconstructed enough to get by. The latest mingw-w64-readline package has a problem (reported here) for which I have two workarounds - use my old (i686-only) package rescued from my old msys2, or don't use GNU readline. (The code I'm building offers that as an option.)

[Biswa96]

All the problems have been fixed. Feel free to reopen the issue if needed.