It's time to see where MSYS and MinGW is again. There's now an installer to take care of all of the versions for you. Get it here. I don't know why this process is always so difficult - some combination of outdated documentation and changes in the packaging system. Let's see how far we get.
- Choose to get the latest repository catalogues.
- Get the MSYS basic system to get make.
- Get the developers toolkit, too.
- Install to the default location (c:\MinGW)
If you want to use all of these goodies from cmd.exe you need to update the path. (Note this isn't the recommended way of doing things - the MinGW want to avoid modifying the path and prefer you do things on a per process basis. See here for more details.) Otherwise, you can just run everything from a msys shell.
To update the path:
- Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Properties".
- Click Advanced -> Environment Variables.
- I'm going to update the PATH in the User Variables section to not mess around with system-wide settings. So, in the "User Variables" box scroll down to the line that says "PATH", Edit... that value, and append ";C:\MinGW\bin;C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin" to the end of the current value.
Now you should be able to use things like make and gcc from the command line. Hey, that was pretty painless.