How do I launch doxygen/perl from Monodevelop on linux/flatpak?

Question

I have a mono-based project that is developed on Linux. Is there some trick to getting custom build steps to run in Monodevelop 7 packaged in flatpak?

The custom build steps that build the doxygen documentation and package it up do not launch. Doxygen and perl are both installed in /usr/bin, and the build steps work properly outside with the legacy monodevelop 5. Doxygen is "not found" and perl runs but is using an (apparently) flatpak builtin /usr/bin/perl that does not have any of the required CPAN modules.

How do I get custom build steps to run in monodevlop 7?

Answer 1

You don't. Flatpak will not run programs that are masked by its packaging, so for example you can not run python or perl scripts that require modules that are not part of the monodevelop flatpak package.

The best solution I can come up with is to launch everything from an external non-cross-platform Makefile, using msbuild for the C# compilation steps. The build does not have to be cross platform, as long as the end product is, so this is a workable, if lame, solution. At least this way you can run the program and debug unit tests in the monodevelop IDE.