[Mono-list] [Mono-dev] Next steps for mkbundle

[James Babcock]

I've got a (so far unpublished, but quite far along) project aiming to
replace the traditional Unix command line (terminal, shell, tmux and
miscellaneous utilities). It's predominantly C#, with a little bit of C++.
One of its wishlist features is a busybox-style dependency-free binary, and
a while back I made myself a hacked up mkbundle that got most of the way
there, except that it still had a libc dependency and couldn't embed AOT.

So it's exciting to hear that mkbundle is getting some love! A general
facility for embedding shared libraries in the bundle would be amazing for
this case. Especially if it could handle both CLR DLLs and Linux shared
libraries, and especially if it included the shared libraries generated by
AOT compilation. If only a subset of these things work it's still useful.

On Aug 19, 2016 7:13 PM, "Miguel de Icaza via Mono-devel-list" <
mono-devel-list at lists.dot.net> wrote:

Hello team,



I am very happy with the new hack to simplify creating bundles of
applications, because we no longer need a C compiler to make these happen,
and as a bonus, we now allow cross-compilation of bundles.



Just a couple of days ago, I added support for a new “--18n” flag that
controls which encoders are shipped with the application, similar to the
same setting that we surface on Xamarin.{Android,iOS,tvOS,macOS}.



The cross-compilation feature has surfaced a problem, when we bundle, we
bundle using the assemblies from the system, but a VM that you can specify,
and this can lead to mismatches between the C and C# code in the runtime
(ie, Mono 4.0 and mscorlib 4.2).



So it seems to me that instead of just shipping Mono runtimes in our server
for cross compilation, we are going to have to ship the entire set of
assemblies that are part of a distribution. Perhaps all of
$prefix/lib/mono/gac as well as the C runtime, and the support libraries
for Mono.Posix.



Now, that is the easy part.



The part that I am debating is the part where we would like to distribute
shared libraries that go with the bundled binary.   Either we can require
that shared libraries be distributed side-by-side, to be a
user/distribution problem, or to allow a way in mkbundle to ship those on
behalf of the user/distributor.



Something like:



                mcs foo.cs  -pkg:gtk-sharp-2.0

                mkbundle –cross arm64-debian-linux-4.2.0
–shared-libs=/tmp/my-gtk-2.0-for-debain-shared-libs



Thoughts?

Miguel.

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