[Mono-devel-list] Assembly versioning

[Marcus]

Mono's behavior does conform to the spec, but the spec also permits the 
runtime to ignore version numbers. I do not know exactly what .NET does. When 
I say "version number," I mean the entire four-component A:B:C:D field. Under 
what circumstances does .NET require an exact match? And does it really 
require an exact match in all four components of the version, or just major 
and minor numbers?

My point is that Mono should be at least as permissive as .NET with regard to 
loading assemblies. From what I see, the ECMA spec is agnostic with regard to 
the GAC. So I really think the behavior needs to be empiracally derived to 
follow .NET as reasonably as possible.

I'm attached an example of the disassembled code (since I do not know if 
binaries work in the mailing list). The corresponding executable works 
on .NET, Pnet, and Rotor, but fails on Mono with

** (version.exe:7013): WARNING **: Could not find assembly System.Xml, 
references from /home/marcus/version.exe (assemblyref_index=1)
     Major/Minor: 1,2
     Build:       3400,0
     Token:       b77a5c561934e089


Unhandled Exception: System.NullReferenceException: A null value was found 
where an object instance was required.





On Sunday 16 May 2004 12:11 pm, Jackson Harper wrote:
> Hello,
>
> 	There doesn't seem to be and hard rules regarding this. If you create
> an assembly and install it to the GAC then reference an assembly with a
> different revision number the assembly will not load. So it seems to
> only be done with System assemblies (from my research at least). I
> haven't found any configuration files or anything that are doing the
> remapping. Do you know how the runtime is supposed to know its ok to
> disregard portions of version numbers?
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