Re: The Debian Mono "Team" needs help
On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 10:08 AM Ahmad Khalifa <ahmad@khalifa.ws> wrote:
>
> On 20/05/2025 15:06, Antoine Le Gonidec wrote:
> > If no one manifests any interest in helping with Mono maintenance, I plan to
> > start removing packages after the release of Trixie. Whatever happens, *nothing*
> > is going to be removed from Trixie, but please don’t wait until Forky is almost
> > there before reacting. At this point it is going to be far too late.
> >
> > If I am to go further with the removal, I will open bugs against the affected
> > packages probably sometime around the release of Trixie.
>
> As upstream has moved around a bit, wouldn't it make more sense for mono
> to package the dotnet repository for Forky instead?
>
> My understanding is that debian mono is sourced from the mono-project
> repo [1], which is no longer maintained, but the wine-mono fork [2] has
> v6 going. wine-mono is distributed with Wine, but not packaged in
> debian. I know wine-hq will download mono and set it up (runtime .msi
> installer), never checked if debian wine downloads it or not.
>
> Meanwhile, Microsoft dotnet [3] is at v10-preview and v9 is fully
> packaged into Ubuntu/Fedora.
>
> For the runtime-only, maybe wine-mono could be a better upstream if you
> aim to keep it minimal at v6, but for the mono-dev side, dotnet v10
> could be a better upstream.
There are developers (cough, me) who explicitly want to avoid
Microsoft's upstream dotnet almost at all costs. It is a fundamentally
different framework from Mono, just like it is a fundamentally
different framework from the .NET Framework. It does things in a
substantially different way that is simply unsuitable for some use
cases, and lacks features like Windows Forms support while providing
no good alternatives.
If Mono was to be replaced with dotnet in Debian, I would have to
compile Mono myself to use and develop the applications I care about.
They aren't the same thing, they must not be conflated.
--
Aaron
> 1. https://github.com/mono/mono
> 2. https://gitlab.winehq.org/mono/mono
> 3. https://github.com/dotnet/dotnet
>
> --
> Regards,
> Ahmad
>
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