[Opensim-dev] Package manager

[Diva Canto]

On 12/27/2014 6:56 PM, Mister Blue wrote:
> Is there a way to incorporate the NuGet package manager 
> (https://nuget.codeplex.com/).

I looked at Nuget. Nuget is a package manager for VS applications. It 
does a lot of things that we don't need, and it doesn't do anything that 
we need to do. Essentially, Nuget takes your VS project, and adds 
additional dlls in the bin folders and additional lines in .csproj. It 
does more .Net things like keeping track of which .Net framework version 
the packages are for. It seems very much tied to Visual Studio, and mono 
support seems weak. From their FAQ: "Keep in mind that the focus of 
NuGet is to let you modify your projects and add references to Visual 
Studio projects." [1]

This is not exactly what we need. We have our own runtime plugin loading 
mechanism, region modules. What we need is a package manager for region 
modules. Region modules have specific needs, such as having their own 
configuration files and their own runtime dependencies. And they don't 
have many of the needs that static link-time packages do: usually region 
modules don't depend on other region modules, they tend to be 
self-contained packages. (although dependencies are possible) And 
obviously, they aren't listed explicitly as dependencies of OpenSim.Region.

There's a console interface to Nuget that seems to be more inline with 
what we need:
http://blog.davidebbo.com/2011/01/installing-nuget-packages-directly-from.html
This seems to be a niche use of Nuget, though, and it doesn't do the 
most critical part of what we need, which is to automate the dll load 
path and the .ini path. If we use Nuget with this interface, it serves 
solely to upload/download packages to/from a central repository, which 
I'm not sure where it is, and we'd have to fix the paths by some other 
means.

Nuget is designed to help people incorporate 3rd party libraries into 
their own VS projects, which is the kind of activity that we do when we 
develop for OpenSim (in Windows). But that's not what we are talking 
about here. We need something that helps non-developers incorporate 3rd 
party custom plugins into a specific application, OpenSim. There is no 
compilation/static link steps at the user's site; there's just dropping 
in additional dlls and configuration files somewhere.

The question is where those files should be dropped, and how they are 
picked up by OpenSim. Dumping everything in bin (which is what Nuget 
does) doesn't sound like a good idea and, in fact, we already have the 
basics in place to host 3rd party plugins under addon-modules. I think 
we should proceed on that route.

So if someone is interested in figuring out how to hack around Nuget to 
make it work well for OpenSim region modules, go ahead. I am not going 
to explore that option any further, as what I saw doesn't seem seem a 
good fit with what we need. My sense is that in the beginning Nuget 
(called Nu) seemed in line with Linux-like package managers, and at some 
point it made a sharp turn to become an extension of Visual Studio.

(It would also be weird to host OpenSim region modules -- a specific 
.Net application's plugins -- in the generic Nuget Gallery. Region 
modules aren't useful for anything but OpenSim.)

[1] http://docs.nuget.org/docs/start-here/nuget-faq

>
> On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 5:37 PM, Diva Canto <diva at metaverseink.com 
> <mailto:diva at metaverseink.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 12/27/2014 3:33 PM, Diva Canto wrote:
>
>         Unfortunately, .Net doesn't seem to understand wild cards in
>         the <probing> element, so the installation procedure will need
>         to edit this <probing> element and add the new directory
>         explicitly to the privatePath, with semi-colon in between,
>         which is not very nice. But that's Windows philosophy, I guess...
>
>
>     We could do this too, and scan everything under
>     addon-modules/*/bin until we find a match. This would have to be
>     done in OpenSim.
>
>     http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1561806/looking-for-net-assembly-in-a-different-place
>
>
>
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