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

[Michal Moskal]

On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 09:36:30AM +0300, Gert Kello wrote:
> >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 is not a good idea. If the installed assembly gets replaced
> later by new version, the GAC would have link to the wrong assembly.
> 
> As far as I know, the purpose of GAC is provide fail-safe way to use
> exactly the same version at runtime as was the version at the compile
> time. (that's why it includes the version number (and key) as a part of
> file path)

Who installs software from source or using some other home-grown methods
under Unix? Only developers. And they are supposed to know what they are doing.

Regular users use rpm/deb, or better yet
red-carpet/apt-get/poldek/whatever. And rpm/deb provides version and
dependency control. There is no easy way to screw this up.

This is not windows messy thing where you have zilions of .exe
installers, each one with own idea of where to put stuff. I guess that
using GAC as such a failsafe place, to prevent users from shooting
themselves in the foot is only a Windows issue.

For me GAC is just a overcomplicated way to get libfoo.so.1 and
libfoo.so.2. But of course complication comes from compatibility here,
so is unavoidable.

-- 
: Michal Moskal :: http://www.kernel.pl/~malekith :: GCS !tv h e>+++ b++
: When in doubt, use brute force. -- Ken Thompson :: UL++++$ C++ E--- a?