[Mono-list] Some questions about shared assemlies, strong names...

[John Duncan]

If you want to deal with name clashes you can just use an RPC UUID or 
some other device. Or use a simple internet-based name registry for 
identifying human-readable names. (Of course you would never have to 
check the registry in everyday business, just when you're defining a 
new assembly name.) Strong names are for making sure that "your" 
assembly is really yours, for liability reasons as much as anything. If 
the private key is free to the public then you lose that assurance, so 
you might as well use a simpler mechanism.

But I suppose this is more of a religious war, saying that if Microsoft 
is doing it, it must be the best way to go. I think Mono can publish a 
solution that is good enough for the free software community in 
general. If it eventually requires using a public private key for 
strong names, that's fine. Perhaps everyone can use the same private 
key.

John

On Saturday, May 3, 2003, at 11:46 PM, Fergus Henderson wrote:

> On 03-May-2003, Paolo Molaro <lupus@ximian.com> wrote:
>> The strong name is useful for 1% of the
>> cases, but I think it doesn't fit the world of free software very 
>> well.
>> Strong names are based on the concept of having a secret key and that 
>> of
>> course doesn't match with source availability. And if you distribute 
>> the
>> private key, 99% of the reason for having a strong name becomes moot
>> and hence useless.
>
> I don't agree.  Having a strong name with a publically-distributed
> "private" key is still useful for dealing with name clashes.
> IMHO that is about 50% of the reason for using strong names, not 1%.
>
> -- 
> Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the 
> pursuit
> The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
> WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. 
> Garp.
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