[MonoDevelop] Cross platform build strategy

[John Luke]

Hello,
On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 08:05 -0500, Jayme wrote:
> 
> I would recommend switching the build system for Monodevelop to NAnt
> (http://nant.sourceforge.net).
>  
> - Create a build script that someone with NAnt installed can download
> to their computer and run on their local windows / linux / OSX box
> that will use the subversion tasks for NAnt to get the code from SVN
> and any other dependencies on wierd versions of GTK# etc. This seems
> to be happening each time you guys release and expecting people who
> are just making the switch to linux to understand all the issues with
> dependency management when you could do this with a NAnt build script
> seems to not be the most efficient method for getting people going
> with a development build of Monodevelop they can use to contribute
> patches back with.
>  
> -Switch the build scripts for Monodevelop itself over to NAnt. NAnt is
> in version 0.85 RC3 and has alot of really great people working on it.
> I will personally volunteer to help write any new tasks needed to get
> things that are being done by the makefiles today working in NAnt.
>  
So I agree (keep in mind it is just my personal opinion) in the abstract
that we want to allow people to just download and build in an easier
fashion than auto* tools, but keep in mind that wasn't really an option
to fairly recently as we had a dependency on a C library.  Now that we
no longer have that issue we can discuss certain things but I am not
sure nant is the answer.

Some of what I would consider a requirement:
 - msbuild compatibility in some sense
	vs.net, sharpdevelop 2, and x-develop I believe all will use this file
format and I think there would be great value in also using it
 - allows installation and dependency checking
	- the logical equivalent of configure && make && make install
	but it could be much simpler then how the auto* tools do it
 - allows dist-like target easily (probably trivial)
 - easy to learn and work with (the people who maintain MD are already
familiar with the current way)
 - is guaranteed to work on mono reliably
 - someone does the work to do it and posts a patch

The people who work on nant seem like very nice people but I am not sure
if fits very well with the way we work or is consistently working on
mono nowadays.

Perhaps a much lower-tech solution would be to provide already built zip
files with source?  This way people could just download, unzip , and run
then if they needed the source it would still be there.

By the way MonoDevelop doesn't work on windows currently.