[MonoDevelop] revisiting default assembly references

[Lluis Sanchez]

El sáb, 14-01-2006 a las 12:07 -0500, John Luke escribió:
> Hello,
>     It seems a frequent question is on why we don't reference System or 
> System.Xml by default.  While I mostly
> agree that we should explicitly reference assemblies, I think too many 
> people expect something more than mscorlib
> to be referenced by default. So I would like to recommend that we allow 
> for things like System and System.Xml
> to be referenced by templates with only their partial name, and then a 
> given template makes the decision on what to reference.
> The version of the assemblies can just be obtained from the current 
> instance of the runtime.  Anyone have any comments on this?

I agree in including references to System and System.Xml in all
templates. About using the partial name, I also agree, although I think
we need to redefine the way references work.

First of all, the "GAC" tab of the references dialog should renamed to
"Packages" or something like this, since it's not showing assemblies
from the GAC, but from the packages available through pkg-config (plus
the system assemblies).

When storing a reference to a package assembly, MD could store the
assembly name, package name, and package version. When loading a project
in a system that does not have the available package, MD could use a
compatible installed version or just show an error if no versions of the
package are available. We could do the same for references specified in
templates.

Does it make sense?
Lluis.