Re: [Pnet-developers] The GAC, shared assemblies and assembly versioning

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Thursday 05 February 2004 03:14 pm, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> On 05-Feb-2004, Rhys Weatherley <address@hidden> wrote:
> > There is one now, of sorts.  Assemblies are organised into
> > version-specific sub-directories underneath /usr/local/lib/cscc/lib.
>
> Why "cscc"?

It's historical.  Originally I was planning to have different assembly 
directories for compiling and running IL programs, so that you could develop 
against one version (e.g. for cross-compiling) and run against another on the 
local system.

Over time, the compiler cache for "cscc" became the defacto default location, 
with "-L" options used if the user really wanted to switch libraries.  The 
name "ilrun" didn't exist until after the compiler was well underway and by 
then the dual install directory thing didn't make much sense any more.

I didn't see any reason to rename a perfectly good install location.  Breaking 
existing user's install locations "just because" is not a sufficiently good 
reason to change.

Why not "pnet"?  Well, I wanted to protect myself in case Microsoft's lawyers 
went crazy and objected to the ".NET" in "Portable.NET" on trademark grounds.  
As it is, a quick name change and documentation update will remove most 
traces of "pnet" from the project.  You'll find very little use of "pnet" in 
the core source code because of this.

Why not "dotgnu"?  Well, DotGNU didn't exist when I started pnet and chose 
"cscc" as the compiler's name.

Like I said, "cscc" is historical.  It's also future-proofed against any name 
change the project might experience in the future.  The compiler is unlikely 
to change name even if the project does.

Cheers,

Rhys.