[Mono-list] Ubuntu

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

If you want to use a newer version of Mono or any of these other
> languages than what your distro provides, you follow The Linux Way,
> which is to download the tarball and build it yourself.
>

There is a little bit of rationale behind this that has escaped the
discussion, and Jonathan's list of languages reminded me of this.

The reason why runtimes, compilers and other pieces of infrastructure tend
to not be packaged is because the code could break existing code in the
distribution.

Some reasons include:
* Distribution makes changes to the software to suit their design
* Distribution applies specific patches for bugs that were reported to them,
but the fixes were not upstreamed
* Distributions applies patches for features that improve the integration on
their system
* Quality assurance and system tests

You will notice that the distributions that we support are either those that
we actually maintain Mono for, so my team plays a double role there
(OpenSUSE) or distributions where Mono is not included by default, and where
we install Mono on a separate directory (our own SLES and RHEL/CentOS,
MacOS, Windows).

Miguel
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