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

[Gert Driesen]

On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 06:18, Todd Berman wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-12-05 at 06:16 +0200, Gert Driesen wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 05:47, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > Now I see why everyone hates MS for always adding proprietary
> > extensions; glad we're better than them :(
> > 
> > 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 ?
> 
> Its still completely possible, the -pkg stuff is a shortcut, we arent
> removing /r and /lib dude ;)

No ofcourse not, I know ... But on linux, users will use -pkg stuff, and
I'm not saying I don't understand the need for this, but sometimes, if
compatibility is important, you just need to live with the limitations
of the system with whom you want to be compatible ... and not add
proprietary extensions (what's in a name) ...

> > 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 ?! :(
> > 
> 
> How does this break anything for NAnt? because lets get down to brass
> tacks dude, last time you brought this up as an issue, it had nothing to
> do with anything other than it changing something in NAnt.

First of all, I'm not just talking about NAnt, you will have similar
issues for make files ...

Adding support for specifying packages to reference to NAnt will really
not be a problem, but it would reduce portability of the build files to
zero, and that's what I am concerned with ... 

I don't think we'll have problems getting NAnt to support Mono 1.0, but
that's not really the issue here ... We want to keep on supporting a
single build file for targeting multiple frameworks ...

I just don't understand why its such an issue to have the mono system
assemblies available in both the GAC and a separate directory, and
instruct users to use pkg-config inline ...

> As for MonoDevelop, it doesnt, and I have no plans to ever make that
> happen on my own.

No, I understand.  And I'm not saying you should, but it does say
something about the importance of portability lately, no ?

Shouldn't Novell/Ximian be showcasing mono's ability to run applications
on all platforms, and frameworks ?

This is no criticism, I just think that would be sending out a better
message (to potential Windows developers) ...

Gert