APEBOX.ORG

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 with ABI changes in libtiff, libjpeg, and Apache, since Debian 7. Then there’s the packages for ARM64 and PPC64el – neither of those architectures is available in Debian 7, so they’re published in the 7 repo but actually built on 8.

A large reason for this is difficulty in our package publishing pipeline – apt only allows one version-architecture mix in the repository at once, so I can’t have, say, 4.8.0.520-0xamarin1 built on AMD64 on both Debian 7 and Ubuntu 16.04.

We’ve been working hard on a new package build/publish pipeline, which can properly support multiple distributions, based on Jenkins Pipeline. This new packaging system also resolves longstanding issues such as “can’t really build anything except Mono” and “Architecture: All packages still get built on Jo’s laptop, with no public build logs”

So, here’s the old build matrix:

And here’s the new one:

The compatibility repositories will no longer be needed on recent Ubuntu or Debian – just use the right repository for your system. If your distribution isn’t listed… sorry, but we need to draw a line somewhere on support, and the distributions listed here are based on heavy analysis of our web server logs and bug requests.

You’ll want to change your package manager repositories to reflect your system more accurately, once Mono vNext is published. We’re debating some kind of automated handling of this, but I’m loathe to touch users’ sources.list without their knowledge.

CentOS builds are going to be late – I’ve been doing all my prototyping against the Debian builds, as I have better command of the tooling. Hopefully no worse than a week or two.

edit I guess Ubuntu 12.04 is coming back too, despite being EOL, for TravisCI support.