[Mono-dev] Mono version numbering

[Avery Pennarun]

On 31/10/2007, Euan MacInnes <euan_macinnes at hotmail.com> wrote:
> This is also better for more lightweight environments and applications, i.e.
> casual games and Windows CE devices which have download/space restrictions,
> and I'd rather not get into custom forks of the mono build to cope with
> those scenarios, where download sizes are limited to 5Mb to 10Mb, so a 50Mb
> download with 120Mb installation isn't practical, yet small independent
> companies that make these games won't want to get into having to provide
> custom builds of Mono to do it.

Speaking completely selfishly, this would be great for me.  We're
working on a cross-platform C# app and oddly, the hardest part of the
installation is ensuring that *Microsoft's* .net is installed
properly.  If we could just bundle a micro-mono for Windows into our
distribution, we wouldn't have to worry about testing on two platforms
(mono and MS .net) and the installation package would be smaller and
faster.

I'm not really impressed with most of the .net runtime (winforms,
streams, buffers, sockets, etc): none of them work they way I'd like
them to work, so I'm forced to reimplement a lot of it for my project
anyway.  But C# and the CLR are great fun.  Thus the ability to get a
minimal C# operating environment would be a really nice option.

That said, I'm not sure it's an option that serves the majority of
mono users, and removing libraries from a custom distribution is not
really rocket science anyway, so I don't really expect anyone to do
this for me :)

> .NET 3.0 itself comes in at a nice 5Mb installation size,
> however backwards compatibility with the bulk of the market (Windows 95/98)
> has been dropped.

If I recall, the .net 3.0 package requires 2.0 to already be
installed.  It's just some updated libraries.  So that 5 megs is *on
top* of the 2.0 size.

Have fun,

Avery