[Mono-list] Mono in the mainstream

[David Curylo]

It's in a much better state than a few years ago, and even in the last 6 months with the CI and all the official packaging, I think it's easier than ever to get mono running.  That said, I think it's really difficult to get service providers to include and advertise their servers with mono support without some sort of commercial entity that will provide Linux support if they need it.  I'm not sure this is in Xamarin's direct interests, but it would be really great if there was some sort of certification program for service providers where they would be encouraged to do the basic support and help their users understand how to avoid common pitfalls.  In exchange, they are referred from the mono site to where providers can be found that offer mono hosting.

Before long, this "lower tier" of shared hosting providers is likely going away, but the problem still remains of complexity of setting up mono with a web server.  Cloud services are cheap, getting cheaper, and you can go to AWS, Dreamhost, etc. and get an Ubuntu/CentOS/whatever VM, deploy mono, and [do a bunch of web server configuration] and you're up and running.  If we can remove [do a bunch of web server configuration] with some packages, puppet modules, or even simple scripts to configure Apache and Nginx to work with mono, then that further takes the burden off service providers or developers to configure all of that.  IMHO the closest thing to this is the mono buildpack on heroku: https://github.com/friism/heroku-buildpack-mono.  But that's for Heroku, and if you want to use just about any other cloud provider, I think you're stuck doing all the DevOps work.

Probably what would be best would be some additional packages that can be installed to configure the web servers to work with mono properly so that shared hosting providers (the LAMP stack people) can install those packages and have a shared hosting setup and offer it without a huge undertaking.  That would also help all the people that show up on the forums every month or so asking how to get ASP.NET up and running.  Would be nice to just say "sudo apt-get install nginx-mono-fastcgi" will install all the dependencies, configure fastcgi, create an upstart job to keep it running, and all anyone has to deal with is their own application specifics.