[Mono-dev] Mono for Symbian

[Armand du Plessis]

Hi,

Some comments inline.

On 5/23/07, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at novell.com> wrote:
>
> Hey,
>
> > > Yes, but that is a proprietary platform that people cant get.
> >
> > Point taken, but it is (a variant of) Mono on Symbian. If proof was ever
> > needed that it can work, this would be an exemplar.
>
> I agree, yes.   So basically it is possible to do so.
>
> We have some experience from a few people that have done experimental
> ports of Mono to some proprietary embedded operating systems in the
> past, so we figured it was not impossible to do.
>
> > > Yes, but unlike Mainsoft who is an active contributor to the community
> > > and share their bug fixes with us and are an integral part of the Mono
> > > community the Red Five folks have not participated or contributed back
> > > to Mono.
> >
> > That's their choice (or maybe their VC's choice...), but I share your
> > view on feeding back to the community. FWIW, I think it would love to
> > help out on a Mono port for resource-constrained devices, be that on
> > embedded Linux, Symbian or Windows CE (the world I'm most familiar
> > with).
>
> Yes, it is one of the downsides of an X11-licensed codebase.   That
> people do not have a compelling reason to contribute back any fixes or
> improvements.   It takes community work to ensure that everyone is on
> the same page and continues to contribute (in the way and spirit that
> Mainsoft has done).

It is possible that their code could not be incorporated, or their
> changes could not be brought over, but I suspect that they have run into
> bugs and those fixes never made them back.


Our class libraries started as an old fork of the mono class libraries.
While it's no excuse or even an attempt at an excuse for not contributing
anything back to Mono it made it much harder to extract patches and fixes
that would be relevant for submitting back to mono. This was aggravated by
our target which were compliance with the CF 1.0 subset of the BCL while
Mono had long since moved on to .NET 2.0 support.

There probably were several opportunities where with some extra effort bug
fixes or code changes could've been converted into patches and submitted
back to Mono and it's really really unfortunate none of those ever made it
back. We owe a lot to Mono and to the information found on these lists and I
don't think anyone on the team is proud of this fact.

Licensing and legal issues aside, personally I'd love to see a Silverlight
implementation on Symbian and this might be an area where we might be able
to make some meaningful contributions back in future.

Mike mentioned tools, that is another area we might be able to make
contributions back. We'll discuss it off-line and see what we can come up
with.

As for embedded devices, we are working on a linker tool right now that
> would reduce assemblies to the minimal set required or to match a
> predefined profile (this is what we are going to use for our Silverlight
> implementation).

We will also be buliding a "baker" tool, so those users using
> Silverlight (or Compact Framework) could pull code from Mono for use on
> their applications (something that we might be able to work together
> with OpenNetCF, although I believe you guys have a non open source
> license for your code, is that still the case?)
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>

Armand du Plessis (Red Five Labs)
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