[Mono-devel-list] Re: [Gtk-sharp-list] kernel support.

[Dag Wieers]

On 17 Jun 2003, Carlos [ISO-8859-1] Perelló Marín wrote:

> I think that the best solution is the binfmt feature with the wrapper
> that exists with Debian packages at:
> 
> http://www.debianplanet.org/mono/dists/unstable/main/source/admin/
> 
> If you want use it with Big endian machines, you should apply a patch
> (http://carlos.pemas.net/debian/mono/binfmt-detector-cli.c.diff)
> 
> It works really good and lets you use wine also, it reads the .exe file
> headers and check if it's a .net executable.
> 
> This way you just execute: ./my-cool-mono-application.exe and it works
> without the need of any wrapper.

The main problem is that this only works if you have control over both the 
Wine package and the Mono package. Which unfortunately we don't. Even on 
Debian you can't force to update both Wine and Mono for this NOW.

And actually it is a workaround for shortcomings in the way binfmt_misc 
works. Whereas it has some overhead too. So the proper solution is to have 
a binfmt_exe module in the kernel (that can be compiled seperately) or 
make binfmt_misc able to make a difference between Windows executables 
and .Net binaries.

I just proposed this as a temporary (standard) solution that developers 
can/should use _now_ while waiting for something like binfmt_exe. (Surely 
it isn't something new.)

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]