As part of Ubuntu 11.10, all Mono packaging in Ubuntu will be undergoing a few changes - chief amongst these is a move from being compiled against libraries corresponding to .NET versions 2.0 through 3.5 (default in Ubuntu since Jaunty), to version 4.0. This not only ensures that developers targeting Ubuntu have access to the latest functionality, but will also result in a disk-space usage drop once everything is rebuilt, thanks to some further changes in the Mono packaging.
Additionally, we now employ more strict checking in our packaging helpers to watch out for unresolved shared library usage - i.e. if an app tries to open "libfoo.so" without specifying a required soname, then package compilation will fail (rather than failing unexpectedly at runtime months later). Shepherding the release through these combined transitions is a big effort, and really needs the loving touch of more than one person on the Ubuntu side - a lot of initial work has already happened in Debian and Debian packaging repositories, but the work is not complete. This is where you come in. First of all, all *applications* need to cleanly rebuild on Ubuntu Oneiric. A successfully rebuilt package will have a dependency on "libmono-corlib4.0-cil". A package which has dependencies on libmono-corlib2.0-cil in addition to libmono-corlib4.0-cil will need to be rebuilt a second time, once its build dependencies have been rebuilt (technical detail on this available on request), which leads on to point two: *Libraries* and *plugins* must only be rebuilt after the *applications* are finished. An application built with 4.0 can open plugins and libraries built with 2.0 (there's just some wasted package dependencies) - whereas an application built with 2.0 will crash if any of its plugins or dependencies are rebuilt with 4.0 More information on the transition is at http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianMonoGroup/Mono210Transition A rough indication of the current status of the transition in Ubuntu is at http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/transitions/mono.html - careful though, the dependency levels it reports are flat-out wrong! Information on the state of 2.10-readiness in Debian (e.g. which packages need patching to work) is at http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianMonoGroup/Mono210TransitionTODO And, in the general case, #debian-cli on OFTC is the place to join if you want to help get this done. I've been concentrating on some of the more awkward packages (e.g. MonoDevelop), and could use help with testing packages marked as fixed in Experimental or fixed in Git. Thanks --Jo Shields p.s. please CC replies, I'm not on either ML.
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