Downgrading MSYS2 to a specific Mingw / gcc version

Question

I have MSYS2 64 bit installed in my system. When I try to check the gcc version, I am getting the following output.

$ gcc --version
gcc.exe (Rev9, Built by MSYS2 project) 10.2.0
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

But I want to use a specific mingw version for my project which uses qt library. When I check my build log and installation folder of my qt project I found this.

|Project name: DataManager
|Project version: undefined
|C++ compiler for the host machine: ccache c++ (gcc 4.9.2 "c++ (i686-posix-dwarf-rev1, Built by MinGW-W64 project) 4.9.2")
|C++ linker for the host machine: c++ ld.bfd 2.24
|Program python3 found: YES
|Found qmake: C:\Qt\5.6.3\mingw49_32\bin\qmake.EXE (5.6.3)

I am assuming that it uses mingw49_32 version and gcc version 4.9.2. I would like to use the same gcc version (4.9.2) in MSYS2.

How can I achieve it ?

Answer 1

You can't do that with MSYS2. Old packages are eventually removed from MSYS2 repos, so even if it had GCC 4.9 at some point in the past, it no longer does. The earliest available version is GCC 9.3.

Even if it was in the repo, you'd have to manually download and install it and all its dependencies, since there's no way to download outdated packages directly from pacman.

---

But, I suspect that:

• You already have GCC 4.9 installed in C:\Qt\5.6.3\mingw49_32\bin.
• Even if you don't, you might be able to get away with using an up-to-date GCC.