[Mono-dev] UIA and olive

[Atsushi Eno]

Hello,

Geoff Norton wrote:
> Stephen,
> 
> On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 11:42 -0600, Stephen Shaw wrote:
>> I was wondering what the future of olive is?  Reason for asking is
>> that UIA has stuff in there as well as depending on WindowsBase.  This
>> makes our release dependent on olive.  Are things going to move from
>> olive to mono? Our will olive stabilize and get released?  Do we need
>> to release a slimmed down version of olive with just the uia stuff and
>> windowsbase?
>>
> 
> Sorry, I don't clearly understand the problem here.  The UIA stuff wants
> a release schedule and is tied to olive because of WindowsBase?
> 
> If thats the case I can see two options, but miguel and eno should
> probably weigh in:
> 
> #1: Mirror WindowsBase into the UIA trees for release
> #2: Move WindowsBase into the Mono release cycle
> 
> #1 is probably preferable for now so that you can release outside of the
> mono release schedule which may not conincide with yours?

I actually think #2 is better: UIA assemblies are part of .NET
compat functionality and better kept in mono/mcs altogether.
Releasing "olive" itself is no go - it is to collect unstable stuff,
and once things became stable they should move to apropriate places
(mono/mcs tree in this case). While they are inside olive, they
must rather be regarded as "not released".

The problem here is that the dependency WindowsBase.dll has never
been worked on (actually I'm even unsure what kind of
work this dll needs) and hence never treated as stable.

Though, for the sake of UIA releases, we could make this dll as
API stable (if we aren't, we could do it within not a long time)
and move from olive to mcs, marking almost everything as MonoTODO.

The same kind of trouble will happen once get complete WCF application
assemblies such as System.ServiceModel.Web.dll. It is almost API
complete, but cannot be released without System.ServiceModel.dll
which has a lot of unimplemented annoyance such as WS-*.
Astoria in .NET 3.5 would likely run into the same problem too.

Atsushi Eno