[Python.NET] Do assemblies need to be placed into the GAC

[Folkert Boonstra]

Brian Lloyd wrote:

>>Thanks for that. We don't currently put our assemblies into the 
>>GAC because 
>>our ASP.NET app can (theoretically) support multiple versions on the one 
>>server machine. Each version lives in a separate sub-directory that then 
>>contains a 'bin' directory for the assembly DLLs.
>>
>>Although you *can* put multiple versions of the same component 
>>into the GAC 
>>(as long as the AssemblyVersion number is different), how would 
>>Python.NET 
>>distinguish these?
>>    
>>
>
>Right now it uses Assembly.LoadWithPartialName, which seems (the 
>docs are vague on this) to load the most recent version of an 
>assembly that it can find.
>
>The ability to side-by-side load different versions of assemblies 
>is one of the (relatively few) places where the matching of meta-models 
>between Python and the CLR breaks down.
>
>Because Python import is name-based and unaware of any concept of 
>versioned modules, my goal has been for 'implicit assembly loading' 
>(loading as a result of import) to do something consistent and 
>reasonable (i.e. load most recent available based on name).
>
>It is possible to load a specific version of an assembly - you would 
>do something like:
>
>  from CLR.System.Reflection import Assembly, AssemblyName
>
>  name = AssemblyName(...) # set required version, etc.
>  assembly = Assembly.Load(name)
>
>  # now import namespaces from the loaded assembly
>
>
>Things get a lot more complicated if you need to load more than one 
>version of a particular assembly (or more likely, you have a dependency 
>on some library the does so). In this case, the names you access via 
>the CLR modules will always come from the first version of the 
>assembly loaded (which will always win in the internals of the runtime).
>
>That doesn't mean that you're hosed though - you just have to do 
>more work to get the right versions of objects, a la:
>
>  from CLR.System.Reflection import Assembly, AssemblyName
>  from System import Activator
>
>  name = AssemblyName(...) # get the right version
>  assembly = Assembly.Load(name)
>  type = assembly.GetType("QualifiedNameOf.TheTypeINeed")
>  obj = Activator.CreateInstance(type)
>
>
>Hope that helps somewhat. BTW, these are all great questions and 
>I'm making notes to put these things in the faq / docs :^)
>
>
>Brian Lloyd        brian at zope.com
>V.P. Engineering   540.361.1716              
>Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com
>
>
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>
Hi,

Without knowing too much about the PythonDotNet environment (yet) I have 
just a general observation.
Shouldn't the versioning knowledge be kept out of the source code? Totally!?
When the containers/assemblies are instantiated the actual binding to a 
specific version should take place.
Isn't there functionality in the assemblies to deal with that?

regards,
Folkert