DavidEGrayson

For what it's worth, pacman does support GPG signature verification, HTTPS, and SHA-256 checksums. There is a GitHub user right now making a bunch of pull requests to MSYS2 to make our PKGBUILD scripts more secure, mostly by using HTTPS and SHA-256 whenever possible.

MSYS2 makes Windows be less of a special case for C/C++ software development. You can use all your favorite build tools from Linux, and there is a large and growing library of software you can install with the package manager. It's easy to contribute your own packages or improve existing ones by making pull requests to here:

https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages