Re: [DotGNU] NSIS Win32 installer - PNET (ex-RE: [DotGNU]Fwd: Re: PNET)

[DrDiettrich]

Sorry for some misdirected messages. I expected that replies to mail in
this list go to the list, but this seems not to be true in many cases.
Why that?

Robert Johnson wrote:
> I have published the new installers at the following
> location:
> 
> Treecc
> http://download.freedom.biz/contrib/bobj/TREECC-0-2-6-Installer.exe
> 
> Portable.Net (Complete)
> http://download.freedom.biz/contrib/bobj/PNET-0-5-10-Installer-Complete.exe
> 
> Portable.Net (Light)
> http://download.freedom.biz/contrib/bobj/PNET-0-5-10-Installer-Light.exe

Thank you very much for bringing pnet to Windows!
I spent many weeks with installing various systems, but could not
compile the pnet binaries myself on neither Debian, Knoppix, FreeBSD or
Windows. Now I finally have a working pnet environment :-)

Here some mixed remarks:

1) Installer
There exist some minor (cosmetic) problems with the installation, when
using other than the default directory. I also missed a note on how to
install the package into an existing MinGW or Cygwin.
The \Source directory name sounds strange, shouldn't it be \src?
What's the empty ml-pnet-0.5.10.tar.gz.tar file?

Why *.tar.gz.tar at all? In many downloads I found incorrect extensions,
which had to be corrected manually or by the unpacker, in order to get
the contents of such archives.

I for myself hate installers, and prefer simple archives (zip, gz...):
- Omitting the setup program may save half an hour of download, for
every package.
- With archives it's possible to read README and other contained
documents before unpacking/installing, and
- the user has better control of what and where to unpack.

In the future I'd like to see small update packages, with only the
binaries which require other than the pnet tools for compilation. The
pnet assemblies then can be compiled with these tools, at the client
side. A versioning system would be nice, however, to reduce the online
and download time to a minimum for all updates.


2) PNET
When running the .NET samples I found a problem with
Enum.GetUnderlyingType. I'm not sure, but it looks as if at least
System\Enum.cs was compiled without Reflection? How to prevent the "not
Enum type" exception?

How to debug pnet code? E.g. how can I find out the statement, where the
above exception really is raised? Is this possible at all?

As long as ilrun is required to run pnet programs, I'd suggest to change
the file extensions from *.exe to e.g. *.il, so that this extension can
be associated with ilrun.
What are the plans for integrating ilrun into the Windows exe loader?
Or for an compiler into native exe files, which do not require ilrun?


Now I'm going to test more .NET samples. As soon as I have solved some
problems with VisualStudio, I also can start to update existing sources
or to write some new modules.

For staying updated with the evolution of the pnet libraries, will it be
a good idea to use CVS? I have used CVS already for other projects, so
this would not be a problem to me. Where can I find instructions for
logging in to the appropriate CVS server?


Sorry for the many questions. I've had so much installation trouble in
the last weeks, and so much to read, that I may have missed many basic
informations.

DoDi