[Mono-devel-list] Nant / OJB.NET / Maverick.NET / NVelocity

[Ben Maurer]

On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 11:37, Ian MacLean wrote:
> Does CodeDOM give us a location for system compilers as well as for the 
> tasks in the framework sdk - gacutil, resgen etc ? note that the 
> framework sdk tools are in a different location from system compilers ( 
> csc etc ) on ms .net installations.  I don't think so. To be honest I'd 
> rather prompt the user at install time with a list of available 
> frameworks. This is what most java ide's do btw. That would entail 
> making an installer but thats another issue.
> Ian
Look, what Todd and I are asking is that the simplest case, using NAnt
to build some C# files, is handled without requireing the user to know
anything about his system. If the user needs to use those advanced
tools, he had better be smart enough to configure his system. However,
if you dont need the information in all cases, just don't ask for it.

Let's be innovative here. On Windows, the path to csc, etc will always
be the same as the path to mscorlib.dll, which you can easily get with
reflection (and this is the path to all the other tools as well).

On Linux, you can execute "which mcs", and you will get the directory
which is holding all the executables.

I am not saying that you need to be platform independant, but rather
that for simple uses of NAnt it is silly to ask the user what they know
about their system, especially when a few minutes of thinking and a few
more of coding can solve the problem.

As for an installer, good luck getting that to be platform independant.