Nerd Food: Adventures in F# Land - Part 3

So the hackery continues. Before I go any further I'd like to say that none of the solutions on this series of blog posts are "real" solutions; you shouldn't really be hacking debs and installing them as root - at least not on your main box, at any rate. If you want to do any of this you should really fire off a VM - its really trivial these days what with Qemu and that. Hopefully when we get to the end of this we can submit some real patches to those in charge.

Warnings out of the way, we can now focus on fixing the problems we bumped into last time. Turns out the first one was actually quite straight forward. The error we were getting was:

Missing method .ctor in assembly /usr/lib/fsharp/FSharp.Core.dll, type System.Security.SecurityRulesAttribute

A quick google revealed that this is a symptom suffered by all of those who are silly enough to use a non 4.0 runtime with an application/assembly that requires it. As it happens, the mono guys renamed their compiler with the 4.0 upgrade; gmcs is no longer, long live dmcs. Hey, its a solution as good as any and it avoids confusion I guess. In fact, it appears this compiler-name-changing thing is rather common in mono-land because the F# AddIn guys even put in a configure option to pass in the compiler:

-c Path/name of the C# compiler executable or script

('mono' is NOT automatically added to the front)

Default value: gmcs

So all that was required to fix this problem is to pass in the correct compiler:

$ ./configure.sh -c dmcs

This took as to the next error, the infamous --resident:

error FS0243: Unrecognized option: '--resident'

Googling didn't help with this one, and if you recall, my grepping didn't either. It turns out the problem was with the wrapper scripts the deb offers us:

$ cat /usr/bin/fsharpc

#!/bin/sh

exec mono /usr/lib/fsharp/fsc.exe --resident "$@"

Since we're on a hacking mood, I just su'd to root and updated the contents of this file as follows (notice the runtime parameter being passed in to mono):

$ cat /usr/bin/fsharpc

#!/bin/sh

exec mono --runtime=v4.0 /usr/lib/fsharp/fsc.exe "$@"

With this, we got the F# compiler to actually do some compilation for us. It then moaned about a missing reference to Cairo, which we can easily fix:

diff --git a/Makefile.orig b/Makefile.orig

index a88a8a8..52caf12 100644

--- a/Makefile.orig

+++ b/Makefile.orig

@@ -57,6 +57,8 @@ FILES = \

src/FSharpResolverProvider.fs

REFERENCES = \

+ -r:$(MONOBIN)/Mono.Cairo.dll \

And now we get to the real error: unfortunately the MonoDevelop code has moved on - hey, we've upgraded from 2.4 to 2.10, _something_ had to change, right!

Microsoft (R) F# 2.0 Compiler build 4.0.30319.1

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

\home\marco\Development\fsharpbinding\src\PowerPack\CodeDomGenerator.fs(248,44): warning FS0044: This construct is deprecated

\home\marco\Development\fsharpbinding\src\Services\Common.fs(11,11): error FS0039: The namespace 'Addins' is not defined

\home\marco\Development\fsharpbinding\src\Services\Common.fs(381,39): error FS0039: The namespace or module 'AddinManager' is not defined

\home\marco\Development\fsharpbinding\src\Services\Common.fs(383,9): error FS0039: The namespace or module 'AddinManager' is not defined

\home\marco\Development\fsharpbinding\src\Services\Common.fs(397,39): error FS0039: The namespace or module 'AddinManager' is not defined

\home\marco\Development\fsharpbinding\src\Services\Common.fs(399,9): error FS0039: The namespace or module 'AddinManager' is not defined

make: *** [all] Error 1

So now we need to get our hands dirty and learn a bit about MonoDevelop's internals. But that's a matter for the next episode.

Update: It seems we're not the first trying to go down this route! Github has a really nice ticket detailing other interpid explorers going down this exact same route!

https://github.com/fsharp/fsharpbinding/issues/24

I'll parse the ticket and see where it will take us!