[Mono-dev] Resolving dependencies while compiling

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 13:18 +0200, paszczi wrote:
> I recently found very annoying thing about mono compiler. Let's say
> that we have the following file structure
> 
> lib/X/X.dll
> lib/Y/Y.dll
> 
> Where X.dll depends on Y.dll
> Now I try to compile project Z which references X.dll and Y.dll.
...
> VS compiler somehow manages to resolve those dependencies
...

VS solves this by doing *lots* of copying -- if X.dll depends on Y.dll,
then there will be *two* copies if Y.dll:

  lib/X/X.dll
  lib/X/Y.dll
  lib/Y/Y.dll

thus allowing things to Just Work.  (And if the assemblies are large,
it'll eat fair bit of disk space with all the copies running around.)

> Currently I'm using a rather nasty workaround: in lib/X/X.dll i put a
> symlink to Y.dll but again this creates a lot of mess.

This isn't much different than VS's "copy all dependencies" approach,
other than saving disk space and being generally saner.  What sort of
mess does this actually create?

> Is there anyway this behavior can be bypassed (via some env
> variable)?.

Also, you can provide paths to -r:, so this works:

	gmcs -t:library c/c.cs -r:b/bin/Debug/b.dll -r:a/bin/Debug/a.dll

where c.dll depends on b.dll which depends on a.dll, without having
extra copies around.  Or use -lib:

	gmcs -t:library -lib:b/bin/Debug,a/bin/Debug c/c.cs -r:b.dll -r:a.dll

Now, if you don't want to specify the entire assembly dependency chain
(e.g. you only want to specify b.dll or X.dll, not both a.dll+b.dll or
X.dll+Y.dll), then you *must* have a copy/symlink:

	cp a/bin/Debug/a.dll b/bin/Debug
	gmcs -t:library c/c.cs -r:b/bin/Debug/b.dll

 - Jon