[Mono-devel-list] Re: Potential GAC implementation ideas.

[Joe Shaw]

On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 17:55, Todd Berman wrote:
> > That would be the packager's responsibility, as it is with shared
> > libraries on Linux today.
> 
> That's the point of the GAC, it isn't the packagers concern anymore.
> 
> The packager should be concerned with getting the library to the GAC (if it
> even needs to be, a library shouldn't be in the GAC unless two separate
> packages need it), not worrying about how to gets there, where it actually
> goes, or anything else.

That sort of breaks the model with packaging on Linux, though.  In the
RPM, there's a reference to a file, and that file has to go *somewhere*,
so why not put it where it's supposed to go? :)

The tool to tell it where to go could be done at build-time, rather than
installation-time, unless there's some reason why the file would go to
different locations on different machines (different $prefix
notwithstanding)

> I would think that it would be fairly safe, the only potential problem I
> could see once the implementation works is if that assembly already exists
> in the GAC, in that case, failing is no problem, and if failing was a
> problem, force will replace the existing one with yours. And remember,
> assembly already existing in the GAC means an assembly with the same name,
> version numbers and public token.

Word.

Joe