[Mono-dev] Mono support on Fedora, Ubuntu, Solaris, etc.

[Andrew Jorgensen]

So Fedora doesn't do noarch packages?  Interesting!  I will admit I've
always had a bad feeling about sharing packages across architectures.

What Geoff was getting at is bi-arch installations.  In Debian and in
openSUSE we can install both architectures at once.  Packages that are
managed-only are marked as noarch and shared between 32 and 64-bit, so
this scenario doesn't work well for the other major distros.

The document that describes our recommendations is here:
http://www.mono-project.com/Guidelines:Application_Deployment

To summarize a bit: we've recommended that only API-stable libraries go
into the GAC and that anyone who wants to use an API-unstable library
should package their own copy of it so that API-incompatibilities do not
break them.  This is a good policy.

The idea of moving the gac to /usr/share and putting package-specific
libraries in /usr/share/{package} has been kicked around for a while and
is worth discussing rationally.  It breaks tradition, but that tradition
was forged in pre-bi-arch days and maybe we should change it.

Side note: I've always thought /usr/lib64 was a bad move.  /usr/lib
should be your native arch (whatever that is) and /usr/lib32 should be
the foreign arch.  But this breaks third-party 32-bit packages working
properly on a 64-bit machine so we are stuck with /usr/lib64.

>>> Paul <paul at all-the-johnsons.co.uk> 09/15/08 5:08 PM >>>
Hi,

> > If you're on a 64 bit box, /usr/lib64/mono. Anything else,
/usr/lib/mono
> 
> So what happens if I install 32-bit and 64-bit mono on a 64-bit box, I
> get 2 of every .dll?

No. When you update via yum, the correct package is installed for your
architecture. If you then decide to use a non-Fedora RPM, then that's
when things go potty and you get 2 of every dll.

TTFN

Paul
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