[Buildroot] Package for .NET Core runtime

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello Andrey,

On Sat, 15 Aug 2020 14:25:42 +0200
Andrey Nechypurenko <andreynech at gmail.com> wrote:

> It would be interesting for me to improve the package and I would
> definitely try to do it. However, I could not commit to any particular
> deadline since tasks with higher priority could preempt this activity
> :-) . I will post to the list when I progress on this.

No worries, we also don't have any specific deadline in Buildroot :-)

Perhaps you could start by sending with "git send-email" the patch you
already have, so we can start giving some initial feedback ?

> Yes, that is right. The host compiler generates binaries which could
> be executed on the target. As I understand, .NET Core runtime is
> essentially a bunch of libraries which are required to run the
> application. Advantage of having the runtime installed ist that these
> libraries could be used by multiple applications. As an alternative,
> on the host, it is possible to generate so-called self-contained
> applications. They contain the binary itself and the copy of runtime.
> So if there are multiple applications, runtime can save the space on
> target. Whether the application is self-contained or framework
> (runtime) dependent is controlled by compilation with --self-contained
> parameter:
> $ dotnet publish -c Release -r linux-arm --self-contained false
> 
> What would be really cool is to provide support for .NET Core
> applications similar to how it is made, for example, with Golang
> ($(eval $(golang-package))). Together with the runtime package it will
> enable a rather smooth way to build .NET applications with Buildroot.

Thanks for those details! Considering what you said, I believe it would
make sense to also package the .NET SDK as a host package in Buildroot,
so that a user can easily have both the compiler on the build machine
and the runtime on the target machine. What do you think ?

Best regards,

Thomas Petazzoni
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com