[MonoDevelop] Cross platform build strategy

[Todd Berman]

On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 16:13 -0500, Jayme wrote:
>         Now, if you want us to just blindly accept that you know best,
>         and let
>         you do whatever you want, I think you are the one who is
>         missing the 
>         point. We just want to be informed, and so far, all you have
>         been able
>         to inform us is that you are unable to actually read an email
>         and reply
>         to it without attacking people who give away their work for
>         free for 
>         others to use. 
> 
> I only began "attacking" because your original reply was very "I don't
> give a crap" in nature. Read it and tell me it can be interpreted any
> other way.
>  

Actually, it was more like 'put up or shut up' as mentioned multiple
times. This mailing list gets inundated once a month by someone who
wants to make MD use NAnt. How many have actually gotten it to work. 0,
so its not like we havnt heard all the arguments before.

> 
>         You have also shown us that your entire argument is
>         distilled down into "Believe it or not, there are people who
>         know 
>         everything, and I happen to be one of them".
> 
> This is a total exaggeration. I am trying to underscore that your
> attitude (detailed above) gives readers such as myself the impression
> that you think you know everything, have looked at everything, are not
> willing to look at something that was a problem before, and don't care
> about community envolvement from others. I never said I know
> everything - I said there are others who may know things better than
> you. If you would read my words and not extrapolate your own meaning,
> you wouldn't need to make this judgement incorrectly.
> 

You might do well to take your own advice. Nowhere did I say I knew more
than anyone else. I am willing to be however, that I know more about
what we use from our own build system than anyone else, so my expertise
there might actually be helpful for someone looking to change our build
system. But its kinda take it or leave it.

> 
>         I am hoping that your next email (if any more come) will be
>         one actually
>         addressing the technical issues that have been found with NAnt
>         (And 
>         guess what, and maybe this is a shocker, you are *not* the
>         first person
>         to want to move MD to NAnt, plenty of others have tried, and
>         they all
>         come up against the same set of issues. Interestingly enough,
>         these are 
>         the *EXACT* issues we have asked for more explanation with)
> 
> 
> I need more clarification with what these issues are. NAnt can build
> code, create a distribution tree, run your code, run unit tests on it,
> package it for distribution (ala tarball / daily snapshot) and compile
> localized resx files, clean a build or install, and check for
> dependent assemblies presence. If there is anything you mentioned not
> covered by this please clarify. I'm not sure what the i18n gmo file
> generation does for you guys that you couldn't do with one of the CLRs
> localization technologies - perhaps I'm missing something.


Its great that it can do these things, but its not special, if it could
do these things while being a) easier to maintain b) more flexible and
c) easier to use than our existing stuff, then that is special. You have
yet to prove that a full working system would actually be smaller than
what we have now.

Believe it or not, auto* is actually doing a lot of stuff that most
people wouldn't understand.

And the make distcheck functionality is not in the examples you cite at
all, make distcheck does about 15 different things, designed to make
sure that your make setup is absolutely perfect, like for example, it
does a make dist, then it builds that tarball with srcdir != builddir,
then it takes what it build, installs it, un-installs it, then it makes
a 2nd stage dist from the tarball it created the first time, and does
the same with that. All of this may not sound useful, but it has been
instrumental in helping locate issues with MonoDevelop. distcheck is
something we rely on to release.

and as far as using po and gettext instead of resx for i18n, i can list
the reasons its better here (now, take note of this, because *this* is
what you should have done instead of running off at the mouth like a
know-it-all 11 year old)

1) It allows us to use one format to i18n our 3 i18n-able formats (Code,
Addin XML files, and Glade files).
2) It uses standard tools that all of our translators already know and
understand
3) Unlike GNU.Gettext.dll (which also uses po files, but attempts
to .net-ify them a bit and use .resx stuff as well) it doesnt require we
have 2 installed copies of the files to i18n all 3 of our formats.

Before we went to make MD translatable, we evaluated a lot of different
possibilities, and chose the one that fit our needs best. Similar to
what we did with the build system.

No one is saying our choices are infallible, or perfect, but I think
everyone is saying that they do seem to work, and before we would
replace them with something else, you might want to show us that it does
work.

--Todd