[Mono-list] Re: [Gtk-sharp-list] DllImport on *.so files

[fd]

On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 07:25, Dag Wieers wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Because of the fact that most uses of DllImport is done on the .so files 
> (with libmajor), anyone interested in running a mono-application need to 
> have these development-packages installed.
> 
> These .so files are usually symbolic links to a versioned library that 
> reside only in development packages. Now the problem is eg. that for my 
> small little proxy applet my users have to install about more than 500MB 
> of development packages that they really don't need.

This is a known issue and an inherent problem with late-binding to
shared objects. Because most users of Mono are developers (with all the
required development packages) right now, it hasn't been a priority to
fix. The Debian packages address the problem by depending on the
development packages of required libraries, which, as you point out, is
rather a lot of overhead for just one symlink as far as the user is
concerned.

We looked into finding an intelligent solution to the problem a few
months back, but nothing struck us as immediately obvious, so the issue
still stands.

Please open a bug for this issue and we'll see if anyone can offer a
better solution.