[Mono-devel-list] Tarball packaging of Mono.

[Raja R Harinath]

Hi,

Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com> writes:

>    I would like to change the packaging of Mono, so the `mono-X.XX'
> tarball contains also the mcs source code and only distribute a minimal
> `runtime', enough to bootstrap Mono: mcs, mscorlib, System, System.XML
> and compile the real Mono class libraries with this.

I think we should still distribute the whole runtime.  We should not
depend on the just-built mono tree to compile mcs/ in a distributed
tarball.  People may be cross-compiling 'mono', and we don't want to add
an additional mcs/ build to complicate stuff.

>    The reason for this is that today we distribute the binaries for all
> of the Mono libraries, but if someone needs to apply a patch for their
> distribution into the C# files, they have to repackage Mono with the new
> libraries, which is rather inconvenient (for shipping a security patch
> for example).
>
>    The issues are:
>
> 	* How to distribute the source of `mcs' inside `mono'.

Probably as a top-level subdirectory.  For development, this can be
easily achieved with CVS modules file -- so the eventual distributed
directory tree should probably look like that too.

> 	* Changing the build system to cope with this.

We probably need to just change various definitions of 'mcs_topdir' to
point to the in-tree mcs.  Maybe a way to use a 'make bootstrap' if any
of the 'mcs' sources was changed.

> 	* Tricking automake (I do not want to use automake in the mcs
> 	  tree, at any cost ;-)

This probably requires integration with automake's 'make dist'.

Otherwise, nothing major.  We probably won't support non-srcdir builds
inside the 'mcs' tree, but that should be OK.

- Hari