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 […]

mono-project.com Linux packages, June 2015 edition

The latest stable release of Mono has happened, the first bugfix update to our 4.0 branch. Here are the release highlights, and some other goodies. Stable Packages This release covers Mono 4.0.1, and MonoDevelop 5.9. As promised last time, this includes builds for RPM-based x64 systems (CentOS 7 minimum), Debian-based x64, i386, ARMv5 Soft Float, and […]

mono-project.com Linux packages, January 2015 edition

The latest version of Mono has released (actually, it happened a week ago, but it took me a while to get all sorts of exciting new features bug-checked and shipshape). Stable packages This release covers Mono 3.12, and MonoDevelop 5.7. These are built for all the same targets as last time, with a few caveats […]

mono-project.com Linux packages – an update

It’s been pointed out to me that many people aren’t aware of the current status of Linux packages on mono-project.com, so I’m here’s a summary: Stable packages Mono 3.10.0, MonoDevelop 5.5.0.227, NuGet 2.8.1 and F# 3.1.1.26 packages are available. Plus related bits. MonoDevelop on Linux does not currently include the F# addin (there are a […]