[Mono-dev] Altering our build system.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello guys,

    Today's Mono build is designed very much with a bootstrapping focus
in mind: it does a full compiler bootstrap, library bootstrap and then
proceeds to compile the 2.0, 4.0 profiles and optionally the 2.1
profile.

    This is problematic for people that are not hacking on everything,
for example folks that are not changing the runtime, mscorlib or the
compiler do not really needs this.

     I would like to move to a setup where by default we assume we have
a working mcs/runtime and we build the configured profiles (defaulting
to 2.0 and 4.0).

     Additionally, we should have an option to trivially configure which
profiles we want to build (2.0, 2.1, monotouch, 4.0).

     A final wish-list item would be to split up the *core* libraries
from most of the extra libraries.  The moonlight team is using a special
process already to limit the number of assemblies built.

Miguel.