[Mono-osx] Requesting tool attention for OS X

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

>> Another option is for someone to complete the Monodoc/Cocoa#  
>> version so that
>> we can ship that by default (it has to be Cocoa# because we do ship  
>> that
>> already with Mono) or it could be written against one of the other  
>> bindings
>> for Cocoa, but it would have to be shipped as a separate tool.
>
> Is Cocoa# the de facto / recommended framework on Mac? There are a few
> out there and I've lost track as to which is "the one to use".

Well, we do ship Cocoa# but it has not been maintained for a long  
time.   I am merely saying that if we want this to be part of the core  
Mono, it has to be done using Cocoa# as we do not currently plan on  
bundling any of the other libraries until one of them emerges as the  
clear superior framework.

That being said, I did look at the other frameworks a few months ago,  
and they had various degrees of completeness, design goals and  
licenses.   I would not say that there is any framework (including  
Cocoa#) that I really like.

For us to bundle a new Mac framework it would have to satisfy a couple  
of requirements:

	* MIT X11, Apache 2 or MS-PL licensed class libraries.

	* Commitment to API backwards compatibility.

	* It should probably be closer to what we did with MonoTouch's API  
design than to Objective-C's native APIs.

Mono has accumulated third party libraries over the years that did not  
meet some of these criteria and we ended up with the burden of  
maintenance, so I would not like to repeat that.   In particular we  
have ended up in a situation where we either deprecate libraries, try  
to merge two APIs and expose them both and do multiple builds or ship  
two versions of the same library.   I would not like to repeat this  
process, not for the Mac, and not for anything else.

In the short term, Cocoa# is what we have, and although not perfect,  
it is bundled and would be fine to build a tool like native MonoDoc.

Miguel.