[Mono-dev] Standard name for mcs

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Russell Wallace
<russell.wallace at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Mark de Bruijn | Dykam
> <kramieb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The problem is that not all version of C# are completely backwards
>> compatible themselves.
>
> I was under the impression Microsoft were being very careful about
> maintaining backward compatibility in both the language and the
> library. If that fails, it's basically going to be a choice between
> going back to Java (which I'd rather not do) or back to C++ (which I'd
> really rather not do). What backward compatibility bugs do you know
> of?
>
>> And for some reason I am still missing the point.
>> Mono going to 4.0 just means dmcs is available.
>
> Well, as of 2.4.4, gmcs is available but now mcs is _not_ available in
> the standard distribution. I infer from that, that once dmcs becomes
> available, gmcs will likewise stop being available in the standard
> distribution. Is that not the case? I.e. is there going to be a change
> of policy in this regard? If so, that would be an adequate solution.

No, mcs has been included in *all* released versions of Mono to date.
It will only be removed in 2.8, about 5-6 years after the addition of
gmcs.

I suspect your problem is the fact that Debian/Ubuntu breaks up Mono
into many tiny packages in order to minimize install size of
applications for end-users, and this unfortunately means that
developers often don't find things that they'd expect to be in a
normal Mono installation. You likely need to install the mcs package
(no idea what the package name is though).

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com