Autorebase hell is I hope a thing of the past. We made all of the executables involved in the running of pacman static (except  msys-2.0.dll obviously, and some post-install scripts, but we try to remove those) and split the update procedure into two parts, &quot;update-core&quot; which handles updating the core of MSYS2 and pacman. The rest of the system update is then completed with &quot;pacman -Su&quot;. We&#x27;ve had no reports of update failures since then.<p>We didn&#x27;t remove support for symlinks, you can enable them in the MSYS env. var winsymlinks:nativestrict if you want. If symlinks didn&#x27;t require special permissions, we&#x27;d enable them by default, but unfortunately they do. Maybe one day Microsoft will change their minds on this. I can only hope so. I guess you may have meant that we don&#x27;t create the &#x27;Cygwin special&#x27; symlinks that winsymlinks:native falls back to when it doesn&#x27;t get permissions? Yes those are an interoperability disaster for MSYS2 when native programs read them.