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

[Mike Kestner]

On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 08:49, Mike Kestner wrote:

> The main issue for me is the ability to use --prefix for 3rd party
> libraries.  Unless I'm misunderstanding what you are suggesting, I don't
> think this gets us any closer to that goal. 

I just had another idea.  ;-)

How difficult would it be to add a /link switch to gacutil that does a
symlink in the gac instead of a copy of the assembly?  If we had this,
it would be possible to install assemblies into a prefix and link to the
installed assemblies from the GAC. 

I think this would allow for packaging and source installations, both
admin and unprivileged.  A gacutil /link could be run at postinstall
time by packagers.  We could set up our install-data-local: rules to
fail with warnings for when permissions don't allow the install. Then
users could still use the existing MONO_PATH mechanism to load the
installed (but not GAC'd) assemblies at runtime instead of us having to
add a full-blown MONO_GAC_PATH solution like I suggested yesterday.

I believe this approach eliminates the need for /package and /root from
a 3rd party library perspective.

-- 
Mike Kestner <mkestner at ximian.com>