Cannot install packages in MinGW Installation Manager

Question

I'm looking forward to use Visual Studio Code for C++ Programming. I installed MinGW Installation Manager for Windows (32 bit - Windows 7). In that, I installed the following packages -

• mingw-developer-toolkit (and all other packages that install automatically with it)
• mingw32-base
• mingw32-gcc-g++ (and all other packages that install automatically with it)

When I click [Menu] Installation > Apply Changes > Apply, the packages start downloading but after some time, an error occurs:

I tried deleting the cache files and running MinGW Installation Manager as administrator, but the error persists.

Is there a way with which I can avoid this error, or is there any other way to do C++ Programming in Visual Studio Code (as I like this Editor) ?

Answer 1

Please see here: https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw/bugs/2340/

TL;DR - SourceForge has an issue with certs which prevents some versions of Windows from downloading from it using MinGW (I encountered this issue on 32-bit XP).

You can however get the packages you need manually. Just put them in

$MINGW_ROOT/var/cache/mingw-get/packages

(where mingw-get.exe itself is in $MINGW_ROOT/bin). The MinGW GUI will check this location first before trying to fetch from the SourceForge source. Here is an easy list of all packages: https://qa.debian.org/watch/sf.php/mingw

You can create an .lst file of all URLs and just grab everything (it's about 900 MB of data) and then use this command to download all:

wget --no-check-certificate -i MinGW32.lst

Answer 2

Definitely, Visual Studio handles many features.

One of which is having it's own compiler preconfigured to run on Visual Studio. To use it you can select C++ project when creating a new project. If you can not see a C++ project category, you should have a "link" that directs you to a tool downloading page where you can look for c++.