So now I can make -C and all that fun stuff... but what to do about truncate? its missing. I don't want to install bulky ass cygwin.
I was also using a manual msys/mingw setup for quite a while until I got fed up with the time consuming manual installation and quirks (gnuwin32 and msys' compiler is completely outdated so you cannot add anything that requires unix emulation, so for example you have to use cygwin truncate). Cygwin is even native x86_64 now!
One manual mingw problem is that unix devs hate Microsoft and make a point of not supporting mingw in their source and esp. autoconf configure even if there would be workarounds, and a lot of these patches are included in cygwin's mingw packages - basically you can use cygwin as an up-to-date msys and next to the build system like make just install the mingw-w64 packages for x64_x86 and i686 which doesn't add any bulk vs. msys at all.
Plus I realized that the auto-updater and installer of cygwin is too damn convenient to be ignored as all packages are up to date you don't have to painfully integrate and update native Windows versions of tex, subversion, git, python+packages, (...). Also nearly all mingw dev headers and dependencies you'll ever need are right there, and if you use native cygwin stuff the speed overhead vs. native Windows/mingw is much lower than I'd expected - the main lag is bacause Windows doesn't have fork() so for example running configure is much slower than on native Linux, but that's also the same on msys.
Btw if ever using cygwin, use this repo in addtion to the official redhead one and select the "exp" button in the installer to get the newest packages:
http://cygwinports.org/ ... I invite every msys user to give it a go, you won't look back :-p