[Mono-devel-list] How hard is it to install Mono?

[Fawad Halim]

Hi Duncan,
	Here are the problems I found people encountered when they installed mono

1. yum usage undocumented: I think I mentioned this before that even 
though there is a hyperlink to the Yum repository, there isn't a writeup 
on how to use that. Adding a yum page, and writing something like
	cat >>/etc/yum.conf
	[mono]
	name=Mono
	baseurl=http://mono2.ximian.com/archive/1.0/fedora-1-i386/
	<CTRL+D>

	yum install mono-complete
would be really helpful.

2. New mono users generally don't know what package does what. IMHO, 
there should at least be a README file that contains a textual 
description of the packages.

3. no mod_mono package.

That said, switching to a 2 package install is probably not a good idea, 
as you'd always have people who don't want gtk-sharp on their computers etc.

Monolithic installers like those for Windows aren't really 'unixy'. That 
said, having one will definitely smooth the curve for newbies. 
http://www.bitrock.com/ and installanywhere are decent installer 
software. installanywhere also integrates with RPM (from what I've heard).


Regards
-fawad

Duncan Mak wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> We are in the process of re-evaluating the way we package Mono, in doing
> so, I'd like to get some feedback from you all.
> 
> When we entered the 1.0 beta cycle, we split the previous setup of two
> packages (mono, mono-devel) into smaller packages, believing that it
> will provide greater flexibility for users, who may wish to selectively
> install only certain parts of the whole release.
> 
> We received a lot of feedback from this change: some said that it was a
> bad decision, as it made the installation process more complicated;
> others said it worked great for them for it fit their use case more
> closely.
> 
> During the 1.0 beta cycle, the package dependency listing was hand
> written and buggy. That was the source of a lot of broken, incomplete
> installations reported [1]; later in the beta cycle, we switched to
> using a script that calculates dependencies based on assembly
> references. With that, our current set of packages is a lot less buggy
> now [2].
> 
> To further facilitate end-users, two meta packages were created:
> 'mono-complete' and 'mono-complete-devel'. Installing these packages
> requires installing every package we ship. Effectively, this mimics the
> old 'mono' and 'mono-devel' package.
> 
> We made available 'mono-all' zip files on the download page, containing
> all the packages we ship for that particular release.
> 
> On top of downloading packages from the download page, there are two
> additional ways of installing Mono: either through the 'mono' channel on
> Red Carpet, or with our YUM repository for Fedora users. Both mechanisms
> will resolve dependencies problems for you.
> 
> Some questions:
> 
> How do you install Mono right now? What do you do to upgrade?
> 
> Is Mono too difficult to install for people new to Linux? For people
> with Linux experience?
> 
> Do you think switching back to a two package setup is a good idea?
> 
> 
> A lot of Mono users are new to Linux, and it is evident that the
> installation procedure for Windows (Paco's excellent installer) and Mac
> OS X (the dmg image from Adam) is far simpler than the various
> mechanisms available on Linux. We like to make the installation
> experience on Linux as simple as the others as well.
> 
> Thanks so much!
> 
> Duncan.
> 
> [1] e.g. mono-web-services requires mono-web-forms, but the dependency
> was not encoded in the RPM.
> 
> [2] Frequently the mono-preview package gets installed in place of other
> packages, resulting in broken installations. This has been fixed in CVS
> and will be rolled out in the next release.