How to install, use ARTIQ-8 beta via MSYS2

We are running the beta build of ARTIQ on Windows (due to IT requirements). ARTIQ 8 install is no longer solving in Anaconda, so we can't get the latest patch of ARTIQ 8. We've tried doing clean installs of Anaconda, tried it in Mamba, etc. and it won't solve. This isn't the focus of this post, just wanted to give context.

We followed the beta manual's instructions on installing via MSYS2/MINGW64, but the metadata for ARTIQ does not seem to install properly, so commands such as artiq_master --version do not run. Here is the traceback:

$ artiq_master --version
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/msys64/mingw64/lib/python3.11/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 563, in from_name
    return next(cls.discover(name=name))
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
StopIteration

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\msys64\mingw64\bin\artiq_master-script.py", line 33, in <module>
    sys.exit(load_entry_point('artiq==8.8418+3663a6b.beta', 'console_scripts', 'artiq_master')())
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "C:\msys64\mingw64\bin\artiq_master-script.py", line 22, in importlib_load_entry_point
    for entry_point in distribution(dist_name).entry_points
                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "C:/msys64/mingw64/lib/python3.11/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 981, in distribution
    return Distribution.from_name(distribution_name)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "C:/msys64/mingw64/lib/python3.11/importlib/metadata/__init__.py", line 565, in from_name
    raise PackageNotFoundError(name)
importlib.metadata.PackageNotFoundError: No package metadata was found for artiq

This may point to MSYS2 is looking for ARTIQ in its Python 3.11 directories, but I haven't completely been able to figure it out. Other users that are using MSYS2 to install ARTIQ 8, did you have to do any other configuration to your shell or are there other steps to get this working outside of the beta manual's instructions?

Aside from that, we don't have a lot of arch experience on our experiment, so using ARTIQ via MSYS2 and using tools like pacman aren't (at least on the surface) very user friendly. Does anyone have any tips or resources on how to make the transition from Anaconda a little less bumpy?

Thank you!

HI @sb10q and @fsagbuya , thanks for your replies. We are now able to get them to install in both MSYS2 and Anaconda now. It seems there is an issue with artiq_dashboard not being able to connect to localhost in this build, but that's out of the scope of this post (will make a new one or raise a Git issue if we determine it isn't on our end).

@sb10q Thanks for updating those. As far as pacman goes, I think we just needed to do a bit of learning over the weekend because we were unfamiliar with it. Searching for specific pacman/MSYS2 issues gets into the weeds of Stack Exchange very quickly, and we found general documentation a lot more useful. Perhaps linking to the MSYS2 package management documentation in the ARTIQ install documentation would be useful for newcomers.