Mono 5.2 patch and DotNet Core 2 update

[Russell Haley]

Hey Guys,

Merry Christmas! Hope this finds you all well. While free time for me
has been at a premium, I have managed to finally get my hands on a
laptop and cram 16 Gb of ram and a nice big SSD in it. That means I
now have room for lots of VMs. I have a GhostBSD image (FreeBSD 11.1)
and will bring up a TrueOS which is a revision of CURRENT. Yay for
Virtual Box!

Mono 5.2

I've created a svn ports repo to mess with and tried out the Mono 5.2
patch from David. While I ultimately succeeded,  the D12440.diff patch
had one error. The chunk was in a RUN_DEPENDS (inconsiquential to the
build) but I patched it manually and ran it. I then found blank patch
files for patch-mono_metadata_socket-io.c,
patch-mono_utils_mono-compiler.h and patch-mono_utils_w32handle.c
(there may have been more, I wasn't careful enough when I was deleting
them).

After some difficulty with the tarball downloads timing out, the build
completed successfully! I'll be checking MonoDevelop as well shortly.
I'm hoping David can chime in and we can finish this off?

DotNet Core 2

Tomas from MS has been building out the Core Framework (corefx) and
has an "Frankensteins Monster" SDK ready for testing. I have been
working on getting the Common Language Runtime (coreclr) test suite to
build to validate the system. The working instructions are being
generated as we go. I've been building the managed parts on Windows,
while Tomas has been using GNU/Linux for a build platform. I'm hoping
my work will start to coalesce with Tomas' soon and we can see some
progress.

Tomas, can you add anything?

Anyway, hope springs eternal in the new year.

Cheers,
Russ