APEBOX.ORG

Howdy y’all

Two of the main things I’ve been working on since I started at Xamarin are making it easier for people to try out the latest bleeding-edge Mono, and making it easier for people on older distributions to upgrade Mono without upgrading their entire OS.

Public Jenkins packages

Every time anyone commits to Mono git master or MonoDevelop git master, our public Jenkins will try and turn those into packages, and add them to repositories. There’s a garbage collection policy – currently the 20 most recent builds are always kept, then the first build of the month for everything older than 20 builds.

Because we’re talking potentially broken packages here, I wrote a simple environment mangling script called mono-snapshot. When you install a Jenkins package, mono-snapshot will also be installed and configured. This allows you to have multiple Mono versions installed at once, for easy bug bisecting.

directhex@marceline:~$ mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 3.6.0 (tarball Wed Aug 20 13:05:36 UTC 2014)
directhex@marceline:~$ . mono-snapshot mono
[mono-20140828234844]directhex@marceline:~$ mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 3.8.1 (tarball Fri Aug 29 07:11:20 UTC 2014)

The instructions for setting up the Jenkins packages are on the new Mono web site, specifically here. The packages are built on CentOS 7 x64, Debian 7 x64, and Debian 7 i386 – they should work on most newer distributions or derivatives.

Stable release packages

This has taken a bit longer to get working. The aim is to offer packages in our Apt/Yum repositories for every Mono release, in a timely fashion, more or less around the same time as the Mac installers are released. Info for setting this up is, again, on the new website.

Like the Jenkins packages, they are designed as far as I am able to cleanly integrate with different versions of major popular distributions – though there are a few instances of ABI breakage in there which I have opted to fix using one evil method rather than another evil method.

Please note that these are still at “preview” or “beta” quality, and shouldn’t be considered usable in major production environments until I get a bit more user feedback. The RPM packages especially are super new, and I haven’t tested them exhaustively at this point – I’d welcome feedback.

I hope to remove the “testing!!!” warning labels from these packages soon, but that relies on user feedback to my xamarin.com account preferably (jo.shields@)