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

[Miguel de Icaza]

> Has anyone ever thought about maintaining not only API compatibility,
> but also maintaining a compatibile commandline interface ?  Doesn't
> anyone see the importance of that ?

Absolutely, we are backwards compatible, as much as possible.  If you do
not want to use -pkg: do not use -pkg, nobody is forcing you to.

If you dislike this approach, suggest and articulate a different way of
properly dealing with this.  

You had a whole week to articulate it, when I posted the proposal to the
list ;-)


> You're really making it very hard to have generic, multi-platform and
> multi-framework build files and I really fail to see the motive for that
> ... unless *nux is the only platform you're interesting in and Windows
> is just considered to be a test platform, but I can hardly believe that
> (I hope) ... MonoDevelop does run on Windows too, right ?! :(
> 
> I hope you understand my concerns ...

The error is in assuming that you will get a `write-once, run anywhere'
setup with Mono unless you want to get an Alien on every system, like
Java does.

Lets consider MonoDevelop: there are two kinds of changes to
MonoDevelop today: Windows.Forms to Gtk# is the largest one, but also
Unix-isms and Gnome-isms.  

SharpDevelop contains too many Windows idioms, which are fine on
Windows, but I would expect my tools to allow me to take advantage of
what is unique of each platform.

I expect Nant to take advantage of features in Linux, and not treat
Linux just as a barebones Windows implementation.