Re: [Mingw-users] Portable MSYS ?

[stn021 <st...@gm...>]

Hi all,

thanks to Keith and Earnie for the suggestions.

Integrating MSYS into the portable apps-suite along with other portable
software is a cool idea.
MSYS would then appear in the start-menu, making the USB-stick like a
self-contained computer that can be used anywhere.

For now I stuck with simpler method of just copying everything in one folder

(and hoping that it works :-)

Earnie was right, the msys-programs are portable almost by themselves. I
messed it up when I did not notice that the copy-process had aborted before
copying \etc, due to a network-error. So \etc was missing and of course
nothing worked.

As a summary, in case someone reads this later on: MSYS can be made portable
like this

- install MinGW+MSYS once on some computer
- take every Exe-file you find in the MSYS-folder (C:\MinGW\msys) and copy
them into one folder of your choice (example: D:\msys)
- same for every DLL
- Important: copy the folder ETC (c:\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc) to the
root-directory of the drive with the EXE-files (D:\etc if you use D:\msys)
- include D:\msys in the PATH. (This can AFAIK be done dynamically with the
portable-apps-launcher that Keith suggested)


The one thing that is not immediately obvious is the folder \etc and its
files. If that is missing the msys-programs terminate without any output,
error or warning.



It appears the the contents of the files in \etc are NOT important.
My \etc\fstab always contains the line "D:\MinGW\   /mingw".
Yet I can plug the USB-stick anywhere with different drive-letters and/or
copy msys+etc to different drives (tried C:, D:, F:, G:) and it always
works. No modifications necessary. Very nice :-)



Cheers
stn