Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 08:45
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The Debian GNU/Linux distribution may include Mono in its default install, with the project leader Steve McIntyre telling iTWire today that "there's a chance that it might do, but it's under discussion at the moment."
There was no discussion about the matter on any of the Debian mailing lists when I last looked at around 4am AEST today, just before entering the land of Nod.
However, discussion has taken place on the blog of one Debian developer, Robert Millan, after he
made a post pointing out that another developer, Josselin Mouette, had
apparently decided that Mono should be part of the default installation for the next Debian release, Squeeze.
Millan's post has so far drawn around 70 responses and comes close on the heels of Mono advocate and Jo Shields posting
a long essay on the Linux Today website, arguing in favour of including the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET implementation in GNU/Linux distributions, and specifically in Ubuntu.
His essay was posted following an invitation from the LT editor Carla Schroder to anyone who wanted to argue the merits of Mono, to submit their thoughts.
Asked about the logic behind the move, McIntyre said: "In this case (as in so many in Debian), it's up to the people working in the area in question. And (unfortunately also common) there's been much more argument and flaming than is sensible.
"The GNOME team are free to pick their own selection of applications that they think make the best GNOME desktop that will fit on a single CD, in much the same way the KDE make their own choices (like staying with 3.5.x for Lenny). Josselin Mouette has updated the dependencies of the gnome2 meta-package, converting Recommends: tomboy into Depends: tomboy | gnote."
Tomboy is a note-taking application written in C# and therefore dependent on Mono; Gnote is a port of Tomboy that, though very recent, has garnered a fair amount of publicity because it does not depend on Mono.
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