[Mono-dev] Static Bundling

[Avery Pennarun]

On 19/12/2007, Paolo Molaro <lupus at ximian.com> wrote:
> From the manpage:
>         mkbundle  generates  an  executable  program that will contain static
>         copies of the assemblies listed on the command line.
> And it does exactly what it's documented to do.

It also does more than just that, since it has options like
"--static".  It seems to solve quite a lot of the world's problems,
actually. :)

> If you need additional capabilities you can roll your own, like
> linking the libs to your program yourself and redirecting the p/invoke
> calls as explained in man mono-config.

This is the part that confused me: reading man mkbundle doesn't
explain the limitations.  Thanks for the explanation.

The p/invoke stuff seems like it might be easy enough to fake by
linking to a static library instead of a dynamic one, and then looking
for dynamic symbols in dlopen(NULL) (ie. the executable file).  The
executable would have to be linked with -rdynamic in that case so that
it exports its own symbols.  All a bit tricky to get right, though.

Have fun,

Avery