Most probably haven't noticed yet but I finished the Mono 2.10.1 debian packaging effort of the past 3 months and uploaded it to Debian/Experimental.

With Mono 2.10 I had to make the biggest changes in Mono packaging since the big Mono 2.0 upload. The runtime no longer supports the 1.0 and 2.0 runtime profile, instead it now supports the 2.0 and 4.0 runtime profile. This meant I had to drop all libmono1.0-cil packages and add libmono4.0-cil packages. This sounds like a lot of s/1.0/4.0/ work but it actually wasn't. Mono 2.10 ships a lot of new libraries over 2.6 and I had again to decide where they should go. "Where should this $library go?" I have been playing this game for the past 7 years maintaining Mono and I finally gave up on it... What, where, when, why? I could give now a 2 hours talk of the issues behind the current packaging approach (keeping the number of library packages low) but instead I will do something else. Please, just take a look at this picture for a second:

If your browser crashed, your eyes hurt or your brain simply melted, I think you have got the idea.

The Big Split

The cure? cli-common-dev! This is a package that contains 2 extremely important debhelper packaging tools for packaging Mono/CLI related packages called dh_makeclilibs and dh_clideps. If you don't know these, they do exact the same thing as dh_makeshlibs and dh_shlibdeps do. dh_makeclilibs generates library dependency tracking information and dh_clideps consumes that information to automatically generate the package dependencies for you. So each library of the 4.0 runtime profile has now it's own package, simple as that, the rest does cli-common-dev for me and you.

"Hey, that Mono packaging bastard is polluting the Debian archive because of his laziness!" No, I am not. This packaging change not only has the advantage of simplifying the packaging and with that bringing new Mono versions faster to you but also reduces the typical install size for applications as they will only pull in the really used libraries of Mono instead of groups of them. I don't have any numbers handy right now as none of the applications are built against Mono 2.10 (yet), but when the transition starts we will get numbers.

New Features

There is also a new SGen flavor of Mono available called mono-runtime-sgen which is no longer using the conservative non-generational Boehm's garbage collector but SGen which is a simple generational garbage collector with promising advantages.

And here some more Mono 2.8/2.10 news from /usr/share/doc/mono-runtime/NEWS.Debian.gz:

SGen Precise Stack Scanning

Enhanced SIMD with new methods for Vector data type conversions and swapping elements in vectors

ASP.NET MVC 3.0 (not included, only supported)

The C# Interactive Shell can now be used as shebang: #!/usr/bin/csharp

.NET 4.0 runtime

C# 4.0 compiler

ASP.NET 4.0

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

System.Data.Services.Client (OData)

glib was replaced with eglib

Removed .NET 1.1 runtime

Architecture Regressions

With the initial upload of Mono 2.10.1 to Debian/Experimental the architecture world broke apart and it regressed on all Mono architectures except for i386 and amd64 There is a reason it's called experimental isn't there?

In mono 2.10.1-3 I could solve all regressions except for kfreebsd-* and armel. Jo Shields fixed the remaining regressions and the world started to look good again in mono 2.10.1-4! He also took care of mono-basic, mod-mono and xsp, but mod-mono and xsp are still waiting for the translation call deadline to pass by so they can also be uploaded to Debian/Experimental.

Planned Transition

As mentioned above, there will be a Mono 2.10 transition needed when the packages hit Debian/Unstable. There is no ETA yet on this when it will happen as I have to coordinate this with debian-release first. But as things are not showtime ready in experimental anyhow, this will not happen too soonish. The Mono 2.10 transition plan will be covered in a following post.

GIVMENOWPLX

OMG, all this rumbling about Mono 2.10 and I still haven't said a word on how to obtain it, sorry about this, just do this and I will shut up now:

echo "deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update apt-get install -t experimental mono-complete apt-get install libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil

(this is the easiest way of getting only mono 2.10.1 from experimental)

Update: mono-addins 0.4 breaks with mono 2.10.1 so you need to make sure you have the 0.6 version from Debian/Unstable installed!