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

[John Luke]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:48:05 -0500, Fawad Halim <fawad at fawad.net> wrote:
> 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
> 

A 3rd option is a happy medium between 2 packages and many packages.
Something like:
mono-core
mono-windows-compat
mono-only-stuff
(optionally split out the System.Web stuff)

although I think the inter-dependencies get a little confusing here