[Mono-list] Compiling Various Libraries under Cygwin

[Miguel de Icaza]

> What kind of dependancies do you see being acceptable for the Mono
> project as a whole?

We need to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.  If the pain to use a
technology is larger than reimplementing it in C#, then we should use
the existing technology.  Otherwise, we reimplement ;-)

> Take GUI, for example. The way I see it there's two ways to do it:
> 1) provide a C#-bindings wrapper for Gtk (or similar) that just exposes
> that functionality directly to the C# programmer in a saparate
> namespace. I see this as being a high level interface, ie the interface
> is at the highest level of the underlying technology. 

The API for GUI tools will be System.Windows.Forms.  Under that API, a
magic trick is being cooked: we will be using Gtk+ on Windows, and Aqua
on MacOS X.

> I'm not familiar with Gtk, but I'd imagine that (1) would be easier to
> implement. On the other hand (2) would obviously provide greater
> compatibility with existing(!) .NET WebForms applications.

For your case (1), we have Gtk# (direct access to Gtk+) and Adam's Qt
bindings.  

For case (2), we will implement System.Windows.Forms (this is my Ximian
goal).

> I guess the question is whether or not the goal is to provide a
> .NET-compatible platform or a GNOME-based ECMA-compatible platform?

On Linux:
	A GNOME-based .NET-compatible platform.
	A GNOME-based ECMA-compatible paltform.

On MacOS:
	An Aqua-based .NET/ECMA compatible platform. 

Supporting ECMA is nice because you can say `I support ECMA', which we
will.  But it is only of academic interest at this point.  What is
really nice is to just be .NET compatible, because, well, thats what
everyone has ;-)

Miguel.