lang/mono: testers wanted for 6.8.0.96 update!

[Phillip R. Jaenke]

All;

Boy, it sure feels like forever ago that I said "hey, folks, what do you
think about updating past mono 5.10" doesn't it? Oh. It was.
But I hope that you'll all find the wait was worth it. I've been hard at
work along with a lot of assistance from the Mono team themselves to get
things not just into a good place, but an actually great place.

What do I define as a great place?
Actual CI testing, no patches required to build[1], no missing features,
no actually failing tests, and full functionality.

Well, here is the official Mono community-supported CI.
https://jenkins.mono-project.com/job/test-mono-mainline-community/label=freebsd-12-amd64/

- ISSUE: System.Web (affects XNS consumers) sometimes experiences kevent
failures on slow systems. Please let me know directly if you have a
reproducible case on a fast amd64 system, rather than opening an
upstream bug.
- ISSUE: System.Web.Extensions has a known crash but has not been
investigated yet. The crash isn't consistently reproducible. If you have
an application that can consistently reproduce a crash, please do open
an issue at github.com/mono/mono directly.
- ISSUE: Mono.Posix fails when testing multiple control messages to a
single socket. Since this is a 'fails because it succeeds' it likely
actually isn't an error. (Please let me know if you know otherwise!)
- NON-ISSUE: The CI reports runtime instability; this is actually a
reporting error. The runtime tests all pass.
- NON-ISSUE: corlib fails certain FileSystemInfoTests; these are
expected failures and can safely be ignored. The tests will be fixed in
the future.
- NON-ISSUE: Mono.Posix IPv6 tests will register a failure because
getsockname() works on FreeBSD. This is a bug in the test.
- NON-ISSUE: Mono.Profiler.Log-xunit indicates failures in the CI;
profiling should work as expected. This is a CI issue.
- NON-ISSUE: All known network code failures in CI are OS-specific tests
for other OSes.

So, you ask now, how do I help test this lang/mono? I would like to know
more, you say! I have important feedback!
Just go here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D2330
Your feedback as a Mono consumer (either as maintainer of a port that
uses Mono or as a user of a Mono-based application) is VERY important to
me, because I only know a VERY small set of Mono applications. And it
likely doesn't include yours. I want to make sure that this update goes
great for everyone, even if you just use an application.

I mentioned improvements, and we really have made some tremendous
strides that I want to go over briefly so that you're not sitting there
going "wait what is going on here?"
OPTIONS for lang/mono: MONOLITE INOTIFY* NINJA NLS ODBC SQLITE X11 DEVELOPER
DEFAULTS for lang/mono: MONOLITE SQLITE X11
(Note: INOTIFY is currently broken and being worked on upstream.)
- NINJA is only used to use Ninja for builds. May help on slow systems.
- NLS is, well, it's NLS
- ODBC provides full native unixODBC support
- SQLITE provides full native SQlite3 support
- X11 is of course graphics support
- DEVELOPER is intended for Mono, Roslyn, and .NET developers and
disables certain privacy functions to allow examination of crash traces.
* INOTIFY is a fully optional package and is not required for most
users; actual kqueue has been implemented in Mono. (Please direct your
applause to the Xamarin and Microsoft teams.)

Thank you all for your patience, thank you to everyone on the Mono and
Dotnet Runtime team for putting up with my 'I really don't know C#, I
just wanna run precompiled bins' questions, and a massive thank you to
the Mono Gitter crew (we know who we are) for all their invaluable help.
And last but not least, thank YOU for any help YOU can provide. Even if
it's just a "my application works faster and doesn't crash," that can be
very helpful information.

Thanks and happy... uh... well... running binaries compiled on Windows
intended for Linux on your god-less FreeBSD infrastrcutre! \o/

-Phillip R. Jaenke | prj at rootwyrm.com
 http://www.rootwyrm.com/

p.s. please email me directly as I am not subbed to the mono@ list

[1] Okay, ONE patch due to an autotools issue resulting from crossing up
a fix we made in CoreFX for libinotify. The full fix will be upstreamed
Very Soon(TM) I promise.