2 HOWTO bundle assemblies inside the mono runtime.
4 Bundling assemblies inside the mono runtime may be useful for a number
6 * creating a standalone complete runtime that can be more easily
8 * having an application run against a known set of assemblies
11 Of course, there are drawbacks, too: if there has been fixes to the assemblies,
12 replacing them means recompiling the runtime as well and if there are other mono apps,
13 unless they use the same mono binary, there will be less opportunities for
14 the operating system to optimize memory usage. So use this feature only
17 To bundle a set of assemblies, you need to create a file that lists the assembly
18 names and the relative files. Empty lines and lines starting with # are ignored:
21 # Sample bundle template
22 mscorlib: /path/to/mscorlib/assembly.dll
23 myapp: /path/to/myapp.exe
26 Next you need to build the mono runtime using a special configure option:
28 ./configure --with-bundle=/path/to/bundle/template
30 The path to the template should be an absolute path.
32 The script metadata/make-bundle.pl will take the specifie assemblies and embed
33 them inside the runtime where the loading routines can find them before
34 searching for them on disk.
36 There are still two issues to solve:
37 * config files: sometimes they are needed but they are not yet bundled
39 * building with the included libgc makes it not possible to build a mono
40 binary statically linked to libmono: this needs to be fixed to make bundles