From an email I received from the MSYS2 development team:
Hi all,
We're pleased to announce new installers. Alexey and Martell did much
more work to get this into shape than I; many thanks guys. The main
focus has been to improve the update experience and remove things from
the base system.
Downloads:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/files/Base/x86_64/msys2-x86_64-20141113.exe/download
http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/files/Base/i686/msys2-i686-20141113.exe/download
As MSYS2 is a rolling release distribution, you may already have a lot
of these changes (and can of course get them from Pacman). However,
we'd appreciate it if people would attempt complete re-installs,
reporting any problems they encounter. To do this, please follow the
instructions from [1] - copied here:
1. Run your existing MSYS2 installation via msys32_shell.bat
2. Make a list of installed packages:
pacman -Qqe | xargs echo > /c/packages.txt
3. Rename your msys?? folder to msys??.old
4. To save server bandwidth and your time, move your old cached
packages directory to the new installation:
In Explorer, remove the empty msys??\var\cache\pacman\pkg folder
then replace it with msys??.old\var\cache\pacman\pkg
5. Run the new MSYS2 installation via msys2_shell.bat
6. Re-install your old packages, by entering:
pacman -S --needed --force $(cat /c/packages.txt)
As always, tar.xzs are present for people who don't like installers or
who require automation. If you use the 32bit tar.xz version [*] then
you should run autorebase.bat before launching the first shell. This
is a good time to mention that autorebase.bat is never needed for
MSYS2 64bit - one of the important advantages of that version.
MSYS2 changes:
pacman.exe and bash.exe are now mostly statically linked (msys-2.0.dll
is always dynamic). This means that our update procedure is a lot
cleaner now (more work is being done on that).
Perl has been removed from the base packages to reduce the download size.
Icons have been added to the installers again.
The 32bit installer automatically runs autorebase.bat during installation.
Cygwin changes:
/etc/passwd and /etc/group are no longer needed, see:
https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-announce/2014-10/msg00042.html
Best regards,
The MSYS2 development team.
[1]
https://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20re-installation/
[*] It *only* makes sense to use 32bit MSYS2 if you have 32bit Windows
or if you work on PKGBUILDs for MSYS2-packages and need to ensure that
the 32bit package can be built.