[Mono-dev] Building mono on Windows issues.

[Alex J Lennon]

On 16/10/2014 16:58, Bryan Crotaz wrote:
> What's the estimation of effort required to get mono buildable in
> windows and debuggable in VS? 6 man months? 18 man months?
>
> I don't have time to donate but I'd be happy to put some money in a
> pot with some of you to hire someone to work on this full time. Feels
> like a concerted full time effort would bear more fruit than
> occasional toe-dips in the water.

Bryan,

fwiw - and this is merely a view from a bystander - I don't think it
would take a lot to address the Windows build itself today.

Mono does build on Windows, but it doesn't "just work" as people tend to
expect nowadays. It needs some stream-lining imho with some setup script
automation or similar for newbies. There are also some missing links in
how an official Windows release is created versus using make, as we end
up with missing files on install (or I am misunderstanding  something
that needs doing, which in itself would be a documentation issue).

To me this isn't a code issue so much as an ownership and release
management issue. I recognise there is a cost to that and there has to
be an ROI for that cost to be worth bearing.

Releases are made with broken Window builds as Vincent says. So imho
it's a dead work "fixing" master at any given time as it will just
become broken again, although some basic setup scripting to pull down
Cygwin, dependencies, to get the installation step working and such
would help people to get going, I feel.

What's more relevant, I believe, is a maintainer who has committed to
Windows build testing and patching prior to an  offical release of Mono,
a buy-in from other release maintainers that this is worth doing (or
what's the point?), and perhaps some CI running the Mono tests in the
background.

Just my 4 cents,

Alex