[Mono-list] I give up / Mac OS X PPC support

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> > Yes, Mono on MacOS X is not ready.  We will have a proper announcement
> > when it is ready for consumption.
> >
> > We are aware of the bugs, and the problems on the engine, you will do
> > yourself a service by just waiting at this point, trying to compile 
> > Mono
> > on MacOS is only frustrating at this time.
> 
> I wish I heard the above statement two months ago ;)
> 
> It's not so much that it isn't ready, it more of the goose chase I felt 
> I was on.  I kept finding little scraps of information about compiling 
> Mono/PPC.  A lot of 'Try XXX, it worked for me'.
> 
> If someone or some documentation simply stated that Mono/PPC wasn't 
> ready for developers to compile, i would have switched modes from 
> trying to use it to trying to help fix it.

There were a number of factors:

	* The Mono PPC at one point was self-hosting, but we found a few
	  problems that lead to some rearchitecting of the code, and 
	  which partially lead to the current situation.

	* Today, given all the problems people are having, and the
	  little or no experience in PPC from the community, there are
	  very few fixes or debugging capability.

Given that the experience that most people with PPC is close to zero, at
this point its best to recommend people to just wait for us to be
finished. 

> I will keep following the development, and I hope to contribute some 
> day.  One question I do have for everyone is who owns the Mono/PPC 
> port?  Is there someone steering it that I should be contacting 
> directly, or is it more of a free for all?

Paolo is responsible, but sending him private email will not be useful,
you will only slow things down.

The best way of moving forward is making the full regression test suite
pass since bugs can be easily tracked down there, but they require PPC
knowledge.

Larger bug reports as in `Gtk# does not work' are just a consequence of
existing problems in the implementation.    

Miguel.