Retirement

Apparently it’s nearly four years since I last posted to my blog. Which is, to a degree, the point here. My time, and priorities, have changed over the years. And this lead me to the decision that my available time and priorities in 2023 aren’t compatible with being a Debian or Ubuntu developer, and realistically, […]

My name is Jo and this is home now

After just over three years, my family and I are now Lawful Permanent Residents (Green Card holders) of the United States of America. It’s been a long journey. Acknowledgements Before anything else, I want to credit those who made it possible to reach this point. My then-manager Duncan Mak, his manager Miguel de Icaza. Amy […]

Too many cores

Arming yourself ARM is important for us. It’s important for IOT scenarios, and it provides a reasonable proxy for phone platforms when it comes to developing runtime features. We have big beefy ARM systems on-site at Microsoft labs, for building and testing Mono – previously 16 Softiron Overdrive 3000 systems with 8-core AMD Opteron A1170 […]

Bootstrapping RHEL 8 support on mono-project.com

Preamble On mono-project.com, we ship packages for Debian 8, Debian 9, Raspbian 8, Raspbian 9, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, RHEL/CentOS 6, and RHEL/CentOS 7. Because this is Linux packaging we’re talking about, making one or two repositories to serve every need just isn’t feasible – incompatible versions of libgif, libjpeg, libtiff, OpenSSL, GNUTLS, […]

EOL notification – Debian 7, Ubuntu 12.04

Mono packages will no longer be built for these ancient distribution releases, starting from when we add Ubuntu 18.04 to the build matrix (likely early to mid April 2018). Unless someone with a fat wallet screams, and throws a bunch of money at Azure, anyway.

Update on MonoDevelop Linux releases

Once upon a time, mono-project.com had two package repositories – one for RPM files, one for Deb files. This, as it turned out, was untenable – just building on an old distribution was insufficient to offer “works on everything” packages, due to dependent library APIs not being necessarily forward-compatible. For example, openSUSE users could not […]

Packaging is hard. Packager-friendly is harder.

Releasing software is no small feat, especially in 2018. You could just upload your source code somewhere (a Git, Subversion, CVS, etc, repo – or tarballs on Sourceforge, or whatever), but it matters what that source looks like and how easy it is to consume. What does the required build environment look like? Are there […]

Long-term distribution support?

A question: how long is reasonable for an ISV to keep releasing software for an older distribution? When is it fair for them to say “look, we can’t feasibly support this old thing any more”. For example, Debian 7 is still considered supported, via the Debian LTS project. Should ISV app vendors keep producing builds […]

Mono repository changes, beginning Mono vNext

Up to now, Linux packages on mono-project.com have come in two flavours – RPM built for CentOS 7 (and RHEL 7), and .deb built for Debian 7. Universal packages that work on the named distributions, and anything newer. Except that’s not entirely true. Firstly, there have been “compatibility repositories” users need to add, to deal […]

A quick introduction to Flatpak

Releasing ISV applications on Linux is often hard. The ABI of all the libraries you need changes seemingly weekly. Hence you have the option of bundling the world, or building a thousand releases to cover a thousand distribution versions. As a case in point, when MonoDevelop started bundling a C Git library instead of using a […]