> indeed, it's just a stupidly named 'package manager' app.. > > it's also annoyingly buggy on windows, and fails to even update things properly due > to files being in use or something.
It's got nothing to do with files being in use. It's perfectly capable of updating itself. The issues happens when you update the msys2 runtime. When you do this, it can't spawn new processes because the DLL loaded by new processes is a different version to what's in memory being used by existing processes.
You can workaround it like this:
First run "pacman -Syup" to show packages to be updated
If you see an msys2 runtime listed, install it individually with "pacman -S msys2-runtime"
If you updated the runtime, close your shell window and open another one