[Mono-devel-list] New mono/gtk-sharp RPM packages for Red Hat/Fedora

[Dag Wieers]

On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> > There are some things to discuss if we want to make these packages better 
> > next release.
> > 
> >   + What goes into mono and into mono-devel ? I'd like to have a slim 
> >     runtime package (mono) and a 'sdk' package (mono-devel) with the rest.
> >     So that most people don't need everything to run mono-apps.
> 
> The only things you can put on the -devel package are the .h files, and
> the static libraries. 

The official packages add monodis and monograph to the -devel package. I'm 
currently only shipping mbas, mcs, mint and mono with the mono package, 
all the other binaries (like al, chktrust, cilc, monoresgen, pedump, 
secutil, signcode sqlsharp, etc.) go into -devel. I haven't had any 
problems running mono-apps with only the mono package.

Reference:
	http://go-mono.com/archive/packagers/mono/mono.spec
	http://dag.wieers.com/packages/mono/mono.spec

 
> >   + Mono/kernel integration. I know debian has a solution to this to 
> >     detect whether it is a mono-app or a windows executable. The RPM 
> >     packages could take advantage of that as well. (But how to package it?
> >     wine packages need to be adapted as well.)
> 
> Exactly, that is a problem.  Also, we will continue to use scripts for
> the main applications, since we want to offer the same CLI independently
> of whether the system supports this or not.

Yup, I understand. Was this already discussed with the wine-folks or is 
this considered something that packagers should work out ? Have the 
changes from the Debian packages been added upstream ?

 
> >   + The dependencies for the mono and gtk-sharp packages are non-existing.
> >     Based on the /etc/machine/config file we could get the right 
> >     dependencies, still I don't want the gtk-sharp dependencies in the 
> >     mono packages and there's no way currently to know who needs it.
> > 
> >     For this I would propose a /etc/mono/config.d/mono and 
> >     /etc/mono/config.d/gtk-sharp, so that each package can drop it's list 
> >     into that. But what to do with conflicting entries ? It probably needs 
> >     an extension so .rpmsave files are not taken into account etc...
> 
> You should keep the Gtk# mappings.  We do not support (nor plan to
> support any time soon) the loading of multiple configuration files to
> remap the libraries.
> 
> So it is not a dependency: it is a list of known remappings.

I understand, but the lack of dependencies for both the mono and gtk-sharp 
packages is biting a lot of users. Not needing the .so files is only a 
small step. Since this is very distribution specific, it would be nice to 
have list of libraries (just like the /etc/mono/config describes).

Unfortunately, that file cannot be used because I don't know what is used 
by whom. What's considered the best way to look for dependencies then ?
Should I write a script that goes through all the code and look for 
DllImports ?

What's the best way to proceed if having proper dependencies is a 
requirement for a 1.0 release ?

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