Interested in contributing to ilspycmd?

[christophwille]

https://github.com/icsharpcode/ILSpy/blob/master/ICSharpCode.ILSpyCmd/README.md

would you be interested in contributing the "--generate-settingsfile" and "--apply-settingsfile"?

[aldelaro5]

@christophwille Hey, very sorry for taking so long to reply as I was unexpectedly busy shortly after I saw your message (and I actually will be for a good part of December, but things will calm down by January).

I would in normal circumstances be happy to do it, but before I give an answer, I need to ask some clarifications from you because I actually am very surprised you made this requests and it leads me to believe that I might not have understood the direction of the project well.

To explain what I mean, one of the biggest reason I made this frontend is because of a feature gap that I thought ILSpy was not interested to fill. It's not that I submitted an issue to ask, it's that I saw a previous response from you that I interpreted as ILSpy wasn't interested in such features. Here's the reply in question: icsharpcode/ILSpy#2800 (comment)

Do you need any of those? We picked what we considered "most common", and intentionally did not go for everything.

So forgive me if I missunderstood the project's intentions, but it seemed to me that if I wanted to be able to supply all the settings I wanted, I would have needed to make my own frontend and not attempt to upstream it since ILSpy didn't seem interested.

I would like to ask for more clarifications on the stance of ILSpy regarding this feature before saying if I would be interested to upstream it. That being said, if I do end up doing it, please keep in mind that it wouldn't be how I did it in this frontend because...to be completely honest, I implemented it in an ad-hoc fashion. I would try to be a bit smarter about it if I wanted to upstream it (for example, I could look into making the settings class itself more serialisable which avoids the very hacky reflection I am doing here).

But yeah, I just want clarifications on this and then, I'll give you an answer.

[christophwille]

My comment from way back when was that ilspycmd's top-level command line switches were selected for "average" use cases and we intentionally didn't add a switch for every possible configuration (Oct 7/22). At that time ILSpyX wasn't there yet to allow using the settings file (Apr 7/23), and quite frankly... the settings file isn't nice as it contains everything and the kitchen sink wrt to settings (not only stuff pertaining to decompilation).

So - having a decompiler-settings-only config file (json or yaml) would be a proper use case these days, especially for the use case of "configure once, check in, drive tool via the checked in config file".

[aldelaro5]

That seems fair, ok so I could be open to work on this in January or whenever I get less busy which should be by January.

That being said, I suggest you make a tracking issue for me to consult so I know the usecases and specs of the feature as the ILSpy project wants it. I say this because I am not too familiar with ILSpyX internals, mostly only with the backend nuget package. It would also give me a thread for me to ask questions if needed.