[Mono-list] Is Mono serious? Is Mono still alive?

[Jonathan Pobst]

cmdematos wrote:
> I don't want to stir up a hornets nest. It is my intent to see Mono as a
> strong enough offering to be able to recommend medium to large companies to
> commit to an Open technology stack that includes (and relies on) Mono.
> Forgive me if I am not well informed, I am definitely well intended.
> 
> The following are issues that stop this from reaching any sort of reality:
> 1) There is no visible Mono timeline and release plan. What is Mono's intent
> and stated goals for the future? Will it try to maintain parity with
> Microsoft Dot.Net to some level, and if so what level and by what time-line?
>   1.1) What are mono's resources?
>   1.2) Who are mono's sponsors?
>   1.3) Are we resourcing up to maintain pace with our plans?

Mono's roadmap is available here: http://www.mono-project.com/Roadmap

In general, Mono is currently aiming to maintain parity with .Net 3.5 
SP1, minus WPF and WF.

This means Mono currently supports:
- System.Core
- LINQ
- C# 3.0
- Some WCF

on top of almost everything in .Net 1.1/2.0.

We will continue working on filling in any remaining gaps in our .Net 
3.5 coverage.

> 2) Many projects that should be enablers of achieving a reasonably parity
> with Microsoft Dot.Net have not been updated since Dec 2008 (such as Olive)
> If these are no longer strategic the thinking behind this should be made
> transparent.

> 3) The mono site has a mix of outdated pages statuses and some (very little)
> new content. I agree that the code is more important than the site, but it
> is less than professional to not date each page edit and structure the site
> so that the latest status and pages are always guaranteed to be clear and
> navigable. Please fix this.

Yes, our website is sadly out of date.

> 4) Is mono executing the best strategy (as in - what is best for Mono and
> the Open Source community) by relying on Mono-Develop? Could we not
> implement (or at least explore) mono on Eclipse or Netbeans IDE's and
> concentrate our efforts instead on integrating to a fully mature IDE
> infrastructure instead of developing YAIDE from scratch without a snow-balls
> hope in hades of keeping up with the other IDE's? Just a thought. I suggest
> that the Mono-Project look into the other IDE's, it wont slow down
> Mono-Develop any and more choice would be good here.

MonoDevelop is already a very mature IDE (code completion, refactoring, 
gtk designer, visual debugging, etc.).  Throwing it all away and 
starting from scratch on integrating into an existing IDE would probably 
set us back a couple of years to regain feature parity with what we have 
now.

MonoDevelop is also a great application for dogfooding Mono and GTK#, so 
we can find and fix issues.

Jonathan