[Mono-list] monolite

[Ben Maurer]

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 00:03 +0100, Paul wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > Roughly what time (GMT) is the monolite-latest package generated? I'm
> > > going to see about adding something to my website about it to avoid the
> > > usual "make get-monolite-latest gives version x and the source won't
> > > compile because it has version y" question (which has caught me today!)
> > 
> > Honestly, the best bet is for people to install version N-1 of mono-core
> > from rpms and then use that to bootstrap. It is the most reliable system
> > to avoid the issue.
> 
> That's the way I usually do it. This time, I thought I'd try it as if I
> was a user who needed to install from source (say they use Mandriva or
> [goodness forbid!] Linspire) for whom there is no rpm available to
> install from.

They can always build an older tarball first (which has a monolite built
in) and then use that to bootstrap.

I realize that is a somewhat longish procedure. However, given that
99.99999% of our users are on Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedora or
SUSE/NLD/SLES, all of which have packages built either in the distro or
by us, it seems much more rational to tailor your instructions to that
audience. 

One could also use the bitrock installer as a seed for the bootstrap.

> > The monolites production isn't quite as reliable as it could be, which
> > is part of the problem.
> 
> What's the problem with it?

Well, the first problem is that it is non-deterministic. It is quite
easy to get complicated error messages if you get the wrong monolite at
the wrong time. In general, we try to bump the version number to keep
the error message friendly, but that hasn't always been the case.

The more important problem is that they are not generated every day, so
if you depend on monolite for getting mono working you may find yourself
hindered.

-- Ben