[Mono-devel-list] GAC (design) issues

[Gert Driesen]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Todd Berman" <tberman at sevenl.net>
To: "Gert Driesen" <gert.driesen at pandora.be>
Cc: "Ian MacLean" <ianm at activestate.com>; "Carl-Adam Brengesjö"
<ca.brengesjo at telia.com>; <mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com>
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 8:53 AM
Subject: Re: [Mono-devel-list] GAC (design) issues


> On Mon, 2004-03-05 at 08:08 +0200, Gert Driesen wrote:
> [snip]
> > What I really don't understand is that you're saying that no one in the
Mono
> > team has experience in using the MS GAC, but still you're confident
enough
> > that you'll do a better job at implementing it than MS. I really wonder
why
> > the Mono team chose to take a departure from MS compatibility at this
point
> > in time.
> >
>
> As far as no one having experience with the MS GAC, I dont think you can
> presume to know that. Not only are many of the ximian mono developers on
> windows all the time, lots of the active contributors have pretty
> extensive win32 experience.

Not that this really matters, but let me quote Miguel on this : " Let me
start by saying that -we- the Mono team have relatively
little experience with the GAC"

Its not about scoring points here : I just want to make sure you know what
the consequence of these design decisions are...

>
> I dont see the departure at all personally. If anything you are taking
> advantage of some peculiarities of the ms implementation which are
> shortcuts to doing the right thing.
>
> Again, you havnt explained why at all you *need* to reference the
> assembly via its path. If you know what version you want an
> Assembly.Load ("AssemblyName, Version=whatever") will work exactly as
> expected.

Ofocurse, so you're asking users to specify the full qualified assembly name
on the command line ?

meaninng : mcs /r:System.Data, Version=...,Culture=....,PublicKeyToken=...

This definitely is crazy, but even then its better than having your compiler
guess what assemblies you want to reference ...

>
> And if you *dont* know what version you want, how can you be picky about
> what you get back?

Ofcourse you need to know what version you want ...

>
> > I really get the impression that the GAC implementation was rushed in
...
> >
>
> I dont believe it is being rushed in at all, however waiting any longer
> would have been a bad idea as well.

My point is : why implement it different from MS ?  Are you really sure that
the Mono implementation of the GAC is better, and easier to manage than the
MS implementation ?  And even if it is : what happened to compatbility ?

And lets not forget : for any other existing .NET tool which works with
assembly references developers will need to specifiy the full path to an
assembly (or the fully qualified assembly name) anyway ...

Gert