[Mono-dev] Repeat builds of core assemblies

[Jean-Michel.Perraud at csiro.au]

Michael, 

how are you fitting msbuild in the build process? Just to confirm if you using the generation of csharp project files and solutions for visual studio? A couple of years back I worked on unwinding the circular build dependencies to build the assemblies from VS. As I recall, even then I needed to disable the parallel build option in VS to avoid some issues. The resulting build process had a few warts left, but I could built most of it from VS fine without nightmare dll swapping.

If you are approaching the build another way, I'd be interested to know how.

You'll find emails on it in the mono-devel-list archives (http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/). I cannot seem to access the archives just now, but a google search  with for instance the terms 
   build visual studio site:lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-devel-list/
will give you prior information. I think there was a thread a few months back of people interested in contributing to Mono from Visual Studio, which may provide some help. I'll see if I can dig this up.

I started a branch to document the build process using the VS toolchains, but could not find the time to follow up.

Cheers,
J-M


From: mono-devel-list-bounces at lists.ximian.com [mono-devel-list-bounces at lists.ximian.com] on behalf of Michael Franz [mvfranz at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 9:46 AM
To: Miguel de Icaza
Cc: mono-devel
Subject: Re: [Mono-dev] Repeat builds of core assemblies
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 3:53 PM, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at xamarin.com>
 wrote:
Hey guys,

I was looking at making the MSBuild system work, and during the process I have encountered a few problems that we have in our existing build system that are problematic.

The problem is that System, System.XML and System.Configuration are each defined in terms of the other assemblies.   So we gradually bring up each one of those assemblies up by first compiling a stub System, which we use to build System.XML and System.Configuration.
   Then we rebuild System, this time referencing System.XML and System.Configuration so we can take a dependency on them, and so on.

<snip> 
Is this a Microsoft circular dependency or a Mono implementation issue? 

Michael