[Mono-devel-list] GAC and third party libraries: post Beta planning.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

    After much painful thinking, I believe that we will do something
like this:

	* Add support for -pkg:NAME and -p NAME to the mcs compiler
	  for processing pkg-config packages.  

	* After talking to Gonzalo about the Windows issues, we believe
	  we can work around the "two copies" problem by either adding
	  support to follow .lnk files to our runtime, or biting the
	  bullet for now.

	* We keep the /package NAME trick in makefiles.

	* Gtk# users must start using pkg-config files, as the -lib:DIR
	  hack in mcs is going away

	* pkg-config files should still try to reference the file
	  directly from the installation directory and not just pass
	  the -lib:DIR -r:library, they should instead use:

		-r:DIR/library

	  The compiler uses a fairly slow mechanism of coping with -L,
	  so its use is discouraged if you know the path location (which
	  anyone with configure does).

	  Note that this points to the package installation directory,
	  not the GAC (Mike, you have no excuses: we both have to give
	  up a little ;-)

	* This does *not* solve the MonoDevelop issue of how to load and
	  browse existing packages.  I think that this problem will have
	  to be solved in a different way: by scanning all the .pc files
	  on the system, and grepping for those that have some special
	  tag (I propose the tag to be called MonoLib:).

Miguel.