[Mono-list] Building Mono on Windows

[Giles Thomas]

Atsushi Eno wrote:
> I have ended up to file the windows build breakage as a critical bug 
> awhile ago:
> https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=605810
>
> Basically eglib migration is all of the cause of the issues.
> Just disable it by autogen.sh --with-glib=system.
>
> And you can't actually use mono without problem. Mono built from trunk 
> cannot build corlib and possibly other libs.
>   
Thanks for that.  Still, it looks like it is building a DLL of some kind 
-- I'm getting /usr/src/mono/mcs/class/lib/basic/mscorlib.dll, size 
2,608,640 bytes.  Anyway, I've realised that the 2.6 branch might have 
all of the fixes I need, so I'll try checking that out and building it now.

As an aside, perhaps it's worth me explaining what we're ultimately 
trying to do.  We've got a big IronPython application [1], which is 
currently Windows-only, but ultimately we'd like to get it running on 
Linux and OS X via Mono.  We're trying to make sure it works on Mono for 
Windows as one of the first steps, for two reasons, both related to 
P/Invoke:

1. We've run the Mono Migration Analyzer and discovered that some of our 
third-party components use P/Invoke (unsurprisingly), so we're 
eliminating those dependencies, but because we're coding in a dynamic 
language we suspect that there may well be problems that the analyser 
has missed.  Because Mono on Windows lets P/Invokes through (we've 
confirmed that our third-party components work on it), we're hoping that 
we can use it to run the application to track down problems in parallel 
with the work to eliminate the third-party components.

2. We have a large GUI testing framework, which also uses P/Invoke.  It 
runs the application-under-test in-process, so if we want to test the 
behaviour of our application running under Mono, we need the test 
framework running under Mono.  Again, we've confirmed that the 
P/Invokery it does works on Mono under Windows, so once we have the app 
up and running, we should be able to run our test suite under Mono; this 
might also help as a long-term way of letting us run regular integration 
tests without having to invest in a build farm full of Macs...

The reason I'm trying to build Mono myself instead of using the packaged 
version is that the application is currently unable to run because of a 
bug that has been fixed on the SVN head but hasn't made its way into a 
release yet [2]; I also suspect that getting a big app like this running 
might throw up more bugs or find more unimplemented stuff, and we might 
wind up wanting to offer patches to the Mono codebase -- so the sooner 
we get going with building it ourselves, the better.

Anyhow, as I said, it looks like the bug that was blocking me is in the 
2.6 branch -- so I'll try building that and see if that gets me any further.


Cheers,

Giles




[1] http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/
[2] http://www.mail-archive.com/mono-bugs@lists.ximian.com/msg74413.html

-- 
Giles Thomas
giles.thomas at resolversystems.com
+44 (0) 20 3051 2751

17a Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5RD, UK
VAT No.: GB 893 5643 79
Registered in England and Wales as company number 5467329.
Registered address: 843 Finchley Road, London NW11 8NA, UK