[Mono-dev] What about the Windows setup of Mono?

[Francisco T. Martinez]

Without putting everyone to sleep with a long winded hitory lesson on 
the Mono Combined Installer for Win32, I would like to clarify a few 
points that may be helpfull in this conversation.

I did not originally conceived the idea of the batch files, these files 
and technique for launching the many different mono runtime and 
development executables were there when Gonzalo Paniagua Javier put out 
the first Mono Windows installer almost at the same time when Mono 
reached release 1.0.  However, in time I grew attach to that pattern and 
thought it was somewhat of a stroke of genius,  to do it like such and 
not polute the system's enviroment variables.  This open the door to 
allow paralell intallation of the  Mono installers and to permit 
complete transparency between Microsoft .NET Framework SDK and Runtime.

Folks advocating for the Mono Combined Installer eliminating the batch 
files and announcing the precense of such utilities as ilasm.exe (which 
one our Mono one or the Microsoft SDK one? :S ) should be ready to 
answer to a torrent of emails from both MS Windows .NET developers and 
our own Mono only Windows developers when things start to collide and 
react adversly.

Keep in mind that unlike the Linux or maybe even Mac OS X versions of 
our redistributable binaries, the Windows installer was design to 
co-exist with but not limited to the following evironments, tools and 
applications:

-- Microsoft .NET Framework SDK 1.x - 2.x
-- Microsoft .NET Framework Runtime 1.x - 2.x
-- Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Prj2Make Visual Studio Add-in
-- Gtk# Win32 Installer for the MS .NET Framework SDK
-- Gtk# Win32 Installer for the MS .NET Framework Runtime
-- GTK Win32 Ported applications like (Gimp, Gaim, Gnumeric, AbiWord)

In conclusion, I look forward to the upcoming release of the new 
installer and still remain comitted to help out my fellow community 
members, but thought it may be a good idea to share these points.

Paco

Daniel Morgan wrote:

> Hopefully, you can continue allowing the Mono Win32 installers to 
> allow parallel installs.
>
> I need the ability to have multiple versions of mono installed.  Some 
> application working in one version, such as, Mono 1.1.6 do not work in 
> Mono 1.1.8.
>
> Wade Berrier wrote:
>
>> Hi Kornél,
>>
>> I'm working on the windows installer and it should be finished 
>> shortly. I'm shooting for today but it may be tomorrow.
>>
>> The good news is that after I'm done automating it the installers will
>> be released in parallel with the mono releases.
>>
>> Your suggestions are very much appreciated.
>>
>> I believe (Paco, correct me if I'm wrong) the reason Paco used batch
>> files instead of setting up environment variables was so that multiple
>> mono versions could be installed in parallel.
>>
>> I will look into packaging libgdiplus with the installer.  I think
>> that's a great idea.
>>
>>
>> Wade
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 20:08 +0200, Kornél Pál wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Is anyone working on it? When will it be released?
>>>
>>> Some suggestions:
>>> I don't like to have bat files in bin directory while having 
>>> executables in
>>> lib directory. I think environment variables should be set in Windows
>>> instead of using batch files. And I would like to have an option to add
>>> mono\bin directory to PATH.
>>>
>>> Some others from the archive:
>>> http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2005-September/014803.html 
>>>
>>> http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/2005-September/014817.html 
>>>
>>>
>>> Kornél
>>