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

[Joe Shaw]

On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 19:51, John Luke wrote:
> I don't necessarily think using rpm, deb, etc. would be needed (or even
> be a good idea) for assemblies intended for the GAC.  Why would you want
> to limit yourself in that way?  It would be far more portable to have a
> tarball (or zip) with a small install script that works on all mono
> supported platforms regardless of the native package system.
> 
> Of course, I realize there are some drawbacks to this approach for
> distributions that rely on there own formats, but it shouldn't be hard
> to fit into that when necessary.

And this is the vast, vast majority of Linux systems out there,
particularly ones in the enterprise who would probably be most
interested in deploying various services like ASP.NET.  Management is
becoming a larger part of administering Linux servers in enterprises,
and installing zip files on an RPM system is not an acceptable solution
to most.

Mono's source distribution can be in whatever... both tarball and zip
probably make sense... but it's the binary distributors like Ximian, Red
Hat, SusE and others that will be the ones shipping it to end users, and
they're all going to use their packaging formats.

Joe