maintaining ports and mono

[Ivan Radovanovic]

On 06/16/2016 21:53, Mathieu Prevot napisa:
>
>
> 2016-06-16 20:08 GMT+02:00 Russell Haley <russ.haley at gmail.com
> <mailto:russ.haley at gmail.com>>:
>
>     Hi Mathieu,
>
>     I have expressed interest in helping maintain mono on FreeBSD but have
>     moved away due to lack of interest and support. Currently someone has
>     ported more recent versions of Mono (Romain I think?), but MonoDevelop
>     is somewhat out of date. I had patches to build MonoDevelop with
>     Rolsyn but couldn't get the MonoDevelop github repos to work with
>     FreeBSD ports so I gave up after multiple requests for help on both
>     this mailing list and the FreeBSD forum.
>
>     Other .Net things I'd like to see:
>     - Ivan had some patches for kqueue issues, he passed them on to me but
>     again, I have moved away from .net on FreeBSD
>     - I would like to see a port of Pinta on FreeBSD
>     (https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/) because gimp makes me
>     want to throw my computer
>     - I once built and ran .Net Core and would like to see if that has
>     progressed, perhaps put together a FreeBSD port for it. The ultimate
>     goal in my mind is to update MonoDevelop to use .net Core
>     - Porting and testing asp.net <http://asp.net> and MVC to FreeBSD
>     - Testing the latest mono on FreeBSD CURRENT for ARM
>
>     I had also at one point seen a possible business model helping clients
>     get their .net software off of Windows to save $$$ and create
>     resalable appliances, but that idea died on the vine.
>
>     Ultimately, there are so many development options on FreeBSD, I moved
>     to something that was better supported (lua), but I really really miss
>     that big beautiful framework. I guess there's always Java, or Python,
>     or Ruby... :(
>
>
> There are many points here, from .NET to IDEs and business.
>
> IMHO having .NET framework work is good, APS.NET <http://APS.NET> too.
> Ultimately, having WPF too would be amazing. I'm planing to probe this
> with the WPF team.
> There is request on UserVoice (Microsoft interface for feedback and
> features requests) of opening WPF sources, which is possible.
> Microsoft recent policy is to make Windows the #1 platform for software
> development, and have GNU tools work natively in Windows.
> Their Azure platform now supports FreeBSD 10.3 VM.
> Despite everything, they will want probably to make sure Windows still
> have competitive advantages, making the WPF and ASP.net not that likely
> to be available/ported/opened.
>
> Historically and to my knowledge, GNU/Linux was used for desktop at
> Google, and FreeBSD rather for servers. Having FreeBSD a stronger dev
> platform is questionable and might require a lot of energy/time/effort
> from the community.
>
> Have you tried java/javaFX/openGL ?
>
> M
>

Hi Mathieu,

IMHO opinion there is no interest to have Mono running properly on 
FreeBSD from either side. Original mono developers are even proud to say 
they don't care about having it run on *BSD, and I guess based on amount 
of feedback you got on this list you can draw your own conclusions about 
enthusiasm coming from this side.

We at company still have some production ASP.Net applications we are 
running using mono/FreeBSD with some patches I wrote both for mono and 
their fastcgi server, but AFAIK those never found their way either to 
FreeBSD port or main mono repository, and I really don't have enough 
time to spend it convincing people to use free source I wrote - what is 
interesting web server patches fix some OS independent bugs with socket 
handling they have, but maybe they thought they were also FreeBSD 
related :-)

I think there is also problem with attitude with mono guys - it seems 
there is perception (as you put it in "GNU/Linux was used for desktop at 
Google, and FreeBSD rather for servers") that there is no need to 
actually have .Net running on FreeBSD, but according to my experience 
serious use of .Net is in web applications, and that is server side usage.

Anyway, in company we are not using C# for any new development (we 
switched back to C++), but we stayed with FreeBSD (I guess for us the 
only way to have stable mono on FreeBSD would be to fork entire project, 
and that would require manpower we don't have at the moment).

Kind regards,
Ivan