[Mono-dev] Mono version numbering

[Miguel de Icaza]

> 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.

You can already do this.  People like Unity (makes of unity3d.com)
distribute Mono with a tiny runtime, mscorlib.dll and little else.

You can ship as much (or as little) as you want.   There are some
mandatory files that you must include (like machine.config or
libmono.dll/libmono.so) but other than that, there are no strong
dependencies.

You can use the Debian packages as an indicator of how granular you can
go;  Those packages have already been pretty well tested in terms of the
split they offer.