OpenSUSE 11.1: Evolution dependent on Mono

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 23 December 2008 01:11

Opinion and Analysis

Any .1 release of a Linux distribution is generally meant to fix bugs which were present in the .0 release, not to introduce new features.
In this respect, OpenSUSE 11.1 differs sharply from other distributions. And the news is not all good either. Novell acolytes please note, this is NOT a review, just some sundry observations.

The cancerous Mono has spread its tentacles further into the GNOME Desktop environment which is present on the GNOME live CD, to the extent that removing mono-core results in the removal of Evolution as well, the default mail program.

Of course, this fact was not among those which Novell released to the public in its announcement about the release.

Remove mono-core and here's a list of what gets removed along with it: banshee-1-backend-platform-gnome, banshee-1-extensions-default, banshee-1, banshee-1-backend-engine-gstreamer, banshee-1-backend-platform-unix, beagle-evolution, beagle-gui, beagle, avahi-mono, boo, evolution, dice, f-spot, ggreeter, gnome-do, gnome-desktop-sharp2, gnome-keyring-sharp, gsf-sharp, gtkhtml314-sharp, podsleuth, taglib-sharp, tasque, evolution-sharp, tomboy, gnome-panel-sharp, gmime-sharp, mono-addins, mono-zeroconf-provider-avahi, mono-zeroconf, monsoon, mono-web, mono-winforms, mono-data-sqlite, mono-data, gconf-sharp2, glade-sharp2, gnome-sharp2, art-sharp2, gnome-vfs-sharp2, notify-sharp, ndesk-dbus-glib, ndesk-dbus, gtk-sharp2
and glib-sharp2.

In June, when I had a look at version 11, Evolution was unaffected by the removal of Mono; a total of 39 files were removed along with mono-core. This has now grown to 45. Miguel de Icaza's attempt to tailgate APIs from Redmond seems to be slowly becoming a core dependency of GNOME.

It looks like what de Icaza told the British technology news site, The Register, in February 2002, is slowly coming true.