[Mono-list] Packaging mono and monodevelop

[Daniel Hughes]

The simple fact of the matter is that xamarin does not care about
desktop linux, Miguel is on record as saying the desktop linux has
failed. Xamarin is a commercial company that makes no money from
desktop linux and thus has not incentive to make it easy for distro
packagers. Take a look a monologue, it is dominated by commercial
companies using mono, there are almost no posts from people using mono
for opensource, requests to be included in monologue from prominent
people involved in the opensource side of mono (Like Ian Norton) have
been ignored. Xamarin has no interest in opensource mono at all.
MonoDevelop 4.0 doesn't actually exists, only Xamarin Studio 4.0 which
is not open source and does not not support linux. This is not a
complaint, its just a commercial reality.

Despite this mono is still opensource and I am seeing a lot of
activity and interest in opensource mono from outside Xamarin. Ian and
I have started a alternative blog aggregation for people involved in
opensource mono here: http://planeteria.org/mono/ If you are involved
in opensource mono or use mono to create opensource products and have
a blog please contact Ian or myself and we will add you.

I think in the long term the continuance of opensource mono will
require the creation of a mono foundation, there has been some talk of
that on this mailing list before but nothing has come of it. It is
clear however that we can not reply on Xamarin to act in the best
interest of desktop linux, and why should they?



On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 2:59 AM, Daniel Isenmann <daniel.isenmann at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm the mono maintainer of Arch Linux and I would really like to package and
> push the mono framework and monodevelop to the next stable release out
> there. But it is totally not possible to find out what the latest stable
> release of mono (and subpackages) and monodevelop is on the servers.
>
> Since ages there is mono 3.x out there but it's stated as beta on the
> official download page. Monodevelop latest release is 4.0.8, but it isn't
> possible to compile it because it's complaining about missing dependency. I
> would really like to support the mono developers and provide the latest
> packages to our community, but with all the splitted sources and packages
> and absolutely no information about a release, it is not possible to
> maintain this.
>
> This is a call to the mono developers / Xamarin to change this and to
> provide us packagers with the information we need to package mono and the
> related packages for our distribution.
>
> I don't want to click anymore through github repositories and outdated
> webpages on mono-project.com to get the information I need.
>
> A webpage with information about the latest (stable) packages and links to
> the source tarballs would be perfect! In the past this was done, but since
> Xamarin has taken the development this page doesn't exists anymore.
>
> I'm really disappointed at the moment with the information policy of Xamarin
> and the packager for Linux distribution.
>
> I really hope that there will be an answer for this call.
>
> Cheers
>  - Daniel
>
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