Packaging MSYS2 as virtual environment

Sunday, February 09, 2025

bleachbit supports Windows, but the app looks somewhat ugly: no hidpi.

Also, the Windows 10 style is even worse. I don’t even want to take a screenshot.

I think gtk is also using custom rendering, similar to Qt. because I tried Mica for Windows and it shows a border area.

(Speaking of custom rendering, almost all modern GUI framework is using it: WinUI/WPF, Flutter, Qt/Qml, etc)

I cloned the repo and want to run it from source. However I soon have a problem: gi(python-gobject) is not installed.

Turns out it need to be compiled and installed separately. The bleachbit project use a full custom build of both gtk and python so it’s not a problem.

Speaking of linux-like packages, I soon turns to MSYS2. install it was easy: there is already python-gobject binding and even pywin32; both as pacman packages.

However I wound like a venv-like setup - a separate MSYS2 env for each project.

Enter msys2_env: https://pypi.org/project/msys2-env/.