[MonoDevelop] Stetic Stability

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 13:52 +0300, Will Daniels wrote:
> Hi, I've just started using MonoDevelop on Kubuntu Fiesty (64-bit).  
> Initially I was using v0.12 from the distribution repositories, but 
> found it very unstable, so now I've installed v0.15 using debs from 
> getdeb.net which is slightly better, but very often I find that the 
> whole IDE just crashes and disappears with no error messages.

Yep, all the time.  Do a save-all before you edit any UI stuff, and
especially before you create a new widget/window/etc... as it crashes
almost every time when you create a new widget.

>   In none 
> of the cases have I found the crashes to be immediately reproducible by 
> doing the same thing - most often it just happens when selecting

Often you can create one widget,  attempting to create a second in the
same session reliably crashes for me.  I restart MD before I create a
new UI element.
 
> something, often in the Stetic GUI designer window but also in the 
> MonoDevelop GUI itself - sometimes just clicking to position the cursor 
> when editing code!

Yep,  but that has gotten better.  With recent versions I just see hangs
when editing code, and pretty rarely;  the window becomes an
unresponsive grey rectangle.

> So I was wondering whether this kind of instability is typical at the 
> moment or if I need to start looking at my configuration to try and find 
> out why this happens? 

Typical.

>  I don't have any such problems with other 
> applications, but I don't really use any other Gnome applications.  Do 
> you think it's worth me trying to build everything myself from source?

I don't understand the logic whereby building-from-source will provide a
more stable application.  My decade plus experience indicates that an
unstable app is unstable because the app is unstable;  very rarely
because of a glitch in the sorcery of the build, packaging, dependency
process.
 
> Any advice or comments from people using MonoDevelop with a similar 
> setup would be much appreciated since I'm quite new to linux and not too 
> sure where to begin...

MonoDevelop is a great tool;  and despite its wackiness still
contributes to my productivity [I've also used it enough to have gotten
good at gut-feeling when the next thing I do is going to make it fall
over].  It is much better than it used to be, and I assume the remaining
issues will get washed out in time.  It is certainly the first really
useful Open Source IDE I have seen since my switch from Windows to UNIX
(back in the Borland/OWL/WfWg days).

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams, Network & Systems Administrator
Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com
Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org