[MonoDevelop] Moving MonoDevelop to GTK# 2.8

[Lluis Sanchez]

Hi,

I'm planning to upgrade the MD GTK# dependency from 2.4 to 2.8. There
are two reasons why I've been reluctant to do this change. The first one
is that 2.4 is more widely distributed, and moving to a more recent gtk#
would reduce our installation target with little feature gain. This
situation still holds true, but gtk# 2.8 is now available in most
distributions. Taking into account that MD 1.0 is still some months
ahead, and that MD is a tool for developers (and development
environments are easier to upgrade), it might be acceptable to switch to
2.8.

The other reason (related to the previous one) is that if MD requires
GTK# 2.8 to run, it means that it won't be possible to generate
applications which depend on GTK# versions older than 2.8. This may be a
problem as production environments may not be as easy to upgrade as
development environments.

To solve this problem, the idea is to allow add-ins to register new
packages in MD. In this way would could distribute an add-in package
which would contain the gtk# 2.4 libraries (only the assemblies). After
installing this add-in, the References dialog would show gtk-sharp 2.4
in addition to the installed version, so developers would be able to
choose which gtk# version they want to target. Those gtk# 2.4 libraries
would be used *only* for compilation, since the gtk# 2.4 package
wouldn't really be installed. When executing the application it would
run on the installed gtk# version (gtk# assembly policies ensure that
newer gtk# version can run apps compiled with old gtk# versions).

Comments welcome.

Lluis.