[Mono-list] Mono 2.6 for Ubuntu

[James Mansion]

B.R. wrote:
> It's not really up to Novell here, it's up to the Debian/Ubuntu 
> maintainers to decide when new versions get supported. Part of the 
> reason for this is that Debian, and by extension Ubuntu, have very 
> specific policies on how things should be packaged (the Debian Free 
> Software Guidelines are very strict, and the Mono project does violate 
> them in a few places), and Novell simply haven't the resources to 
> invest in hiring someone specifically to do Debian (and by extension 
> Ubuntu) packaging, so it's left up to the maintainers who do a pretty 
> good job with the time and resources they have. The reason binaries 
> are shipped for Windows with every release is because there's no 
> package specification to follow, so the binary packages are easy to 
> build (build the libs, put them in the right places, package them up 
> in an installer and you're good to go).
I think that's a bit lame - it makes a big assumption about the mono 
team shipping a package for a start. Binary compatibility for apps (if 
not drivers) is at least passable with current Linux systems.  Why 
should it be hard to ship a universal binary when Adobe and Sun (in 
particular) have managed it for a long time?

I can see that Novell need SLES to be the best platform for Mono for 
commercial, but I think it needs to be ubiquitous first and then given 
value add on the Novell product - and that means better support for 
other Linuxen, and OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.

James