MINGW-packages for Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Multiple open source and/or free EDA tools are developed and primarily used on GNU/Linux platforms. Typically, builds are managed with tools such as make or cmake, and GCC or LLVM/Clang are used for compiling. Migrating all those build systems to native Windows toolchains can be painful. Using PKGBUILD files for MINGW32/MINGW64 allows reusing the existing plumbing and, at the same time, produced binaries can be used on Windows natively. MSYS2 is the most used environment for building open source EDA tools already; however, most projects don’t use PKGBUILD recipes but custom scripts. Hence, the work on this project is mainly rewriting custom scripts for adhering to MSYS2 packaging guidelines.

Overall, there are a handful of approaches for providing great prepackaged/prebuilt and easy-to-set-up EDA tooling environments: see hdl/packages.

The complete list of available MSYS2 packages is shown at packages.msys2.org/package. When first upstreamed, packages are shown at packages.msys2.org/new until maintainers of MSYS2 sign them and move them to the official repositories. By the same token, when updates or patches are upstreamed, packages are shown at packages.msys2.org/queue until signed and uploaded. Therefore, users and contributors should expect some delay between updates being accepted in msys2/MINGW-packages and changes being available in official repositories.

The following tables summarise the state (🟪 upstreamed, 🟩 ready but not upstreamed, 🟧 work in progress, ⬜ to do) of EDA related packages, and provide references to relevant issues/PRs regarding their support on MSYS2.

That is, projects/tools on MSYS2 feel like Unix when it comes to building them (GCC, clang, make, cmake, etc.), but the artifacts are native Windows binaries ("just like any other Windows program"). Typically, users want to install mingw-w64-x86_64- packages, which can be used outside of an MSYS2 environment optionally.

The official git repository for PKGBUILD recipes targeting MINGW32|MINGW64 (MSYS2) is msys2/MINGW-packages. Due to GitHub’s permission management constraints, it is undesirable to open Pull Request (PRs) across organisations. Therefore, all contributions regarding PKGBUILD recipes are handled in repositories from users'/contributors' namespaces and opened against msys2/MINGW-packages. That allows MSYS2 maintainers to edit PRs in-place. Anyway, hdl/MINGW-packages can be used for discussion and coordination of tightly coupled EDA packages.

Other than that, branch main contains testing and tracking resources, on top of MSYS2’s infrastructure:

MSYS2 borrows the package management plumbing from Arch Linux. That is, PKGBUILD recipes and makepkg are used. It’s the same same codebase, but patched to work on MSYS2 (Windows). Therefore, upstream repositories are different. Apart from that, the usage is the same, and PKGBUILD files for MSYS2 are very similar to the equivalent recipes for Arch Linux.