[Mono-devel-list] New mono/gtk-sharp RPM packages for Red Hat/Fedora

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> There are some things to discuss if we want to make these packages better 
> next release.
> 
>   + What goes into mono and into mono-devel ? I'd like to have a slim 
>     runtime package (mono) and a 'sdk' package (mono-devel) with the rest.
>     So that most people don't need everything to run mono-apps.

The problem is that in Mono things are mixed.

The runtime libraries are the SDK libraries;  And tools like `mcs' which
apparently look like development components, are an integral requirement
of the runtime.

The only things you can put on the -devel package are the .h files, and
the static libraries. 

>   + The libraries in /etc/mono/config are now the .so files, I've made a 
>     small perl script that converts them to the correct versioned library. 
>     So that at least people don't need to install 200MB worth of -devel 
>     packages and it still works on the system it was packaged for.

Clever trick.  Duncan, we should get this.

>   + Mono/kernel integration. I know debian has a solution to this to 
>     detect whether it is a mono-app or a windows executable. The RPM 
>     packages could take advantage of that as well. (But how to package it?
>     wine packages need to be adapted as well.)

Exactly, that is a problem.  Also, we will continue to use scripts for
the main applications, since we want to offer the same CLI independently
of whether the system supports this or not.

>   + The dependencies for the mono and gtk-sharp packages are non-existing.
>     Based on the /etc/machine/config file we could get the right 
>     dependencies, still I don't want the gtk-sharp dependencies in the 
>     mono packages and there's no way currently to know who needs it.
> 
>     For this I would propose a /etc/mono/config.d/mono and 
>     /etc/mono/config.d/gtk-sharp, so that each package can drop it's list 
>     into that. But what to do with conflicting entries ? It probably needs 
>     an extension so .rpmsave files are not taken into account etc...

You should keep the Gtk# mappings.  We do not support (nor plan to
support any time soon) the loading of multiple configuration files to
remap the libraries.

So it is not a dependency: it is a list of known remappings.