Installing MinGW - Copy?

Question

MinGW

Please tell me, when you install MinGW (through a bootloader that downloads files from the Internet during the installation process), this is not really an installation, but a simple copying of files? Is it possible to transfer once installed MinGW to another system with the same version of Windows and fully work with its tools (compiler), or is it just a clean installation? )

Answer 1

Can.
It is enough to set the path to the bin mingw directory in the PATH environment variable on the new system.
Additionally, you can configure the variables: MINGW_HOME and possibly MINGW_ALT_HOME
They should contain the path to the MINGW installation directory.
MINGW_ALT_HOME - optional, can be used if you keep 2 variants of mingw to build x32 and x64 applications. You register one (main) in MINGW_HOME and the other in MINGW_ALT_HOME.
See what the native installer adds there to make it clearer.
I use msys2 + mingw, the same is easily portable. Once did it. But now I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't make much sense. Now I'm only transferring the home directory of the msys2 user, it can be configured anywhere in the file system.
For msys2, you can additionally set the MSYS_HOME variable, it must contain the path to the usr msys2 directory.
These environment variables are used by the IDE to find installed instances of mingw. If you collect from the command line, then PATH is enough.