[Mono-dev] Seeking advice regarding mono and .net incompatibility

[Jonas Larsson]

Hello,

I've put myself in an sticky situation and need advice. I'm working in
a large .net project with parts that heavily relies on xml validated against
large schemas (thousands of lines). For various reasons I've been campaigning
for a mono port a long time. Finally, I got a go ahead some weeks ago. 

Along the journey so far I've found a handful of bugs in mono that I've reported
and submitted patches to. Nothing odd about that. One "bug" is really
problematic to me however since I know now that it won't be fixed in mono, see
Bug 502115. In a way I understand your position (basicly it's ms .net thats
buggy, not mono), but on the other hand mono aims to be highly compatible
with .net if I understand things correctly.

I've patched mono for my personal needs in this case, but we can't force our
users to build mono from source to include my patch. I can disable validation
on mono, but that's really not optimal. Another possible approach may be to
compile mono's xml into a separate assembly and distribute that to end users
but that requires extra maintenance. Suggesting rewriting of schemas to my
bosses will unfortunately be frowned upon since it will require weeks of
coding, QA and meetings with external partners.

Has anybody been in this situation and has any advice or suggestions? Are
there any official project guidelines for how compatible with .net mono
should be?

/Jonas