Add support for running dotnet core on Banana linux

[tmds]

There are some pull requests on supporting specific well known distributions in this repository. I created this issue to improve documentation (and perhaps tooling) for the general issue.

Banana Unix is the term used by @jasonwilliams200OK in https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/1532 for some platform that doesn't support coreclr yet. This could be the next version of Debian or it may just as well be a custom built linux system for an embedded device.

Some concrete questions:
What are the minimal parts that need to be built for supporting a new platform? In what repos are they? And with which commands can they be built?
Can these bits be built on an existing supported platform? Or does the build have to be done on the new platform?
If the latter, is there any bootstrapping needed (e.g. get a first-stage core runtime to build the one for the new platform)? How is this done?

\cc @jasonwilliams200OK @ellismg @stephentoub

Banana Unix is the term used by @jasonwilliams200OK in dotnet/cli#1532 for some platform that doesn't support coreclr yet.

'Banana assembly' term was coined by @davidfowl in dotnet/corefx#4333 (now in Documentation/architecture/net-platform-standard.md#guard-rails-supports). I just took 'inspiration' from the better artist. 😄

[joshfree]

Documenting the process of running on or porting to a new arbitrary distro is definitely on our radar. We're focused on RC2 / CLI right now but we do want to get to this general issue in the coming months.
/cc @blackdwarf

[sec]

Any update on this? What's needed to get dotnet build from sources?

@sec, if CoreCLR and CoreFX build on a platform, then its pretty much upto the dotnet team to bridge the steps till the platform package manager. The best we can do at this point is to port CoreCLR and CoreFX and make sure all the native+managed test suites (~4GB of tests) pass. This sometimes need quite a figuring out part.

After that we can just wait for packaging and muxer bootstraping etc. to happen by dotnet team.

[tmds]

@jasonwilliams200OK it would be nice if you could do the whole thing. E.g. crosscompile for some flavor of linux and chosing an rid for that. For example the Raspbian guys could make raspbian dotnet.

@tmds, see https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/917. This discussion is going on at least at 5 different places. Would be nice to combine all that into one thread.

[sec]

@jasonwilliams200OK lets assume I have coreclr and corefx compiled, tests passed - what's the next step to build dotnet cli binary on unsupported (FreeBSD in this example) OS ? I cannot find any info anywhere - build.sh keeps downloading bianries for ubuntu etc ?

@sec, this is the exactly kind of conversation I had and it is a complex process: https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/917. I will try it for Alpine aports and see how it goes. If/when i succeed I will write a step-by-step guide and send a PR to https://github.com/dotnet/core-docs. DIY FTW! 😎

[sec]

@jasonwilliams200OK Yes I've read that also :) I would like to do some hacking myself in the meantime - if you could just point me to proper repo/script to start building dotnet cli - maybe I can get it somewhere.

[sec]

[dotnet@freebsd ~/core-setup]$ ./cli/exe/dotnet --version

Microsoft .NET Core Shared Framework Host

Version : 1.0.2-beta-000555-00
Build : 42de240

The next is to build Microsoft.NETCore.App - any lead for this? :)

The specified framework 'Microsoft.NETCore.App', version '1.0.0' was not found.

• Check application dependencies and target a framework version installed at:
  /proc/2725/shared/Microsoft.NETCore.App
• Alternatively, install the framework version '1.0.0'.

[obadz]

I'm also stuck trying to build corefx on Nix (I've got coreclr built: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/compilers/coreclr/default.nix)

It seems that the build script attempts to download a tarball (something like https://dotnetcli.blob.core.windows.net/dotnet/preview/Binaries/1.0.0-preview2-002733/dotnet-dev-ubuntu.14.04-x64.1.0.0-preview2-002733.tar.gz) but it seems to also need MSBuild.exe which is not in that tarball.

Could you provide the list of inputs required for bootstrapping along with where we should place them?

(It should be assumed that package managers from most distros will not let the build process access the network to do its own downloads btw as that would obviously kill reproducibility/caching)

[janvorli]

@obadz bootstrapping new OS is now a very tedious proces. The tarball downloaded by the script is just a bootstrap tarball that enables it to actually get msbuild and other managed stuff to enable building the managed parts (said in a simplistic manner).
You can take a look at the end of the https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/917 where a discussion on adding Alpine support in a similar manner is going on.
cc: @mellinoe, @Petermarcu

[obadz]

hi @janvorli, is your last statement still true or are we now able to build the .NET tools from source+bootstrap binaries?

thanks