[Mono-dev] Installers and relative paths

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> The latest Windows installer doesn't set any environment variables in
> the wrapper scripts and batch files (MONO_PATH, etc...).  This works
> fine in finding the gac binaries.
> 
> I've looked into doing this for the linux installer as well, and some
> programs didn't work.  gmcs worked, but mcs didn't (couldn't locate a
> hardcoded dll).
> 
> Why would this be different on the different oses?  Is only windows set
> up to use relative paths?

Yes, Windows is set to use relative paths, while the Unix version is
not.  I think we should fix this.

They could be the same, but *typically* on a Unix system, when Mono is
"integrated" with the OS (prefix=/usr), the conventions are something
like this: most stuff is relative to $prefix, but configuration is
relative to /etc.

Which is why we can not "guess" the start location.

Maybe what we could do is have the runtime detect whether its being
executed from /usr/bin, and if so, it fallsback to /usr for most things,
and /etc for the rest.

But if the binary is not in /usr/bin/mono, then it should compute things
relative to the executable path.

Miguel.