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Our Blogs Open Sauce How GNU/Linux users can keep Mono at bay
Our Blogs Open Sauce How GNU/Linux users can keep Mono at bay | How GNU/Linux users can keep Mono at bay |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Monday, 01 June 2009 | |
  
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Developer Tim Chase, who describes himself as "a genetic geek", has created a package called Mononono which creates explicit conflicts with core Mono packages. He has created a .deb package but the source is also available for users of other distributions to compile and use. Chase dislikes Mono for a variety of reasons. "A sketchy patent cloud hangs over it, and I prefer to keep on the level (my music collection is mostly ripped to OGG instead of MP3; I prefer to browse without proprietary extensions; etc)," he told iTWire. Additionally, "it's a bit bloated for my poor low-end machines - both in terms of disk-space and the runtime memory footprint and I find C# (the first-class language of Mono) an ugly and hackish language." Chase says his original goal was to simply remove Mono from his systems. "But I found that even after removing Mono, I'd 'apt-get install' various packages to explore, only to find that they reinstalled Mono. I wanted a way to force it to my attention." Apt-get is one of the applications that are used to manage software installation, removal and upgrades on Debian and its derivatives. "Originally asking around, I heard it might be do-able with apt/dpkg's 'pinning' functionality. However, I failed to get this to produce the results I wanted (likely my error), so I took the lazy way out and created a Debian package that intentionally conflicted with Mono. That way, I at least get a "resolve this conflict" complaint when I try to install something that will bring in Mono." Chase has been using GNU/Linux for the last 14 years. "I'm a genetic geek (my father is a semi-retired computer science professor), so I cut my teeth coding on Dad's Apple II+ in middle-school," he says. "I first installed Linux in '95 (Slackware via a stack of floppies) on my mighty 486DX/100. I still use WinXP at work, but my home machines run varying combinations of Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X. You'll find me active on the Vim, sed, Python, and Django mailing lists." |
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