[Pkg-mono-devel] Re: Mono Debian Packaging

[Paolo Molaro]

On 01/20/04 Ganesan Rajagopal wrote:
> Are you talking about all the dlls being located in /usr/lib? Looks like
> just configuring with --libdir=/usr/lib/assemblies or a similar directory
> will do the trick. I'll experiment with this. 

No, that won't work: you'll get broken packages.

> I think we should raise this issue in the mono-devel list again. I looked at
> the archives and the issue came up more than a year back without a clear cut
> answer. /usr/share/assemblies was propped up as a potential candidate, but
> it appears that some assemblies _are_ platform specific. May be we need both
> /usr/share/assemblies (for arch independent) and /usr/lib/assemblies for
> platform specific stuff. Let's raise this in the mono-devel list so that
> this gets fixed properly for all distros. 

There are other issues as well (the GAC support, partially implemented
in mono).
Currently the assemblies are not arch-specific, but this will likely change
in the future for at least mscorlib.dll, but that's going into /usr/lib/mono.
The assemblies that are currently put in lib will go in two places:
	/usr/share/assemblies
and
	/usr/share/mono/ ... somewhere ...
The first dir is to allow other .net implementations to access them.
The second dir is the GAC: the file name there will depend on the actual
assembly version and key. There will be a tool to install assemblies
in the correct dir.
We didn't write all the code yet to support the changes: until we do I
suggest you keep using the upstream setup (not sure we'll be able to
change it for 0.30, but likely in 0.32 all this will be sorted out).

> I saw that. I agree with your decisions; I see no need for a separate
> libmint package but would like to see mint in Debian.

mint on x86 in debian is just a waste of server space, IMHO.
The name also apparently clashes with some matlab utility of sorts
so you may get complains for debian boxes installed at universities etc.

I had a quick look at the packaging files: here are the issues I saw.

*) the description for mono-jist says it's a code interpreter: this is
misleading, it's a just in time compiler.
*) it also says it's for x86 only, but it works also on powerpc (not yet
fully, but it's getting there): so it should have Architecture: i386 powerpc
*) the mono-utils description says it contains monodis (two times).
AFAICS it's missing pedump. Please, don't install monosn: we'll remove
that upstream, too.
*) copyright in mcs only mentions the GPL, though the assemblies are
almost all under the MIT license (see the README and LICENSE files in
mcs/).
*) later, I'd like for debian to have a package with just the base
assemblies (mscorlib, System, System.Xml) and one (or more) separate
packages for the rest of the assemblies.
*) I'm not sure that the cli-runtime virtual package is for, especially
when mono-assemblies-arch provides it.
*) the description for mono-mcs only lists the C# compiler, while the
package contains also a number of other CLR develpment utilities.

lupus

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