[Pnet-developers] ECMA compatibility checks - call for discussion

[Rhys Weatherley]

The issue of ECMA-compatibility has been raised a couple of times in recent 
weeks, usually as some variant of "should we build pnetlib as ECMA-only to 
prevent DotGNU people using patent-infringine non-ECMA API's?".

I've been thinking about it a bit and have come up with some possible options, 
which I'd like to open up to the floor for discussion.

1. Compile ECMA-only always.

2. Add a "-ecma" or "-std" flag to the C# compiler which will issue a warning 
whenever a non-ECMA API is used, but the library is otherwise full-blown.  
DotGNU policy would be to always compile with this flag set.

3. ??? (more ideas requested)

I personally don't like 1 because there is so much existing code out there 
that we need to support until we have our own equivalents.

Option 2 can be dealt with in one of three ways:

a) Compile and install both ECMA and non-ECMA versions of the library, with 
the "-ecma" flag switching between them.

b) Mark up pnetlib using [ECMACompatible] attributes, so that the compiler 
knows what's what.  Any use of an unmarked feature with "-ecma" set will 
result in an error/warning message.  There would be approx 300 classes to 
mark up in this fashion.

c) Process All.xml with some program/script to turn it into a "rule file" that 
the compiler loads to get the same information as [ECMACompatible], but 
without needing to modify pnetlib.

Please comment.

Cheers,

Rhys.