Some notes on Fedora and Mono

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Rahul
Sundaram<sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> The functional gain as I have already explained is less disk space and
> less RAM usage on the Live CD. Remember, since the Live CD already
> doesn't include Tomboy for the past couple of releases, the addition of
> Gnote brings in the benefit of a nice note taking app by default and
> indeed this has been one of the primary motivations in bringing in Gnote
> to Fedora.

I find the dust up over gnote amusing considering that several other
tomboy clones exist for the sole reason of getting around the mono
dependency issue while providing the same functionality.

tomdroid for android written in Java (or whatever passes for java on android).
conboy was developed i think specifically for maemo and is written in C.

I'm shocked we haven't been lobbied to make conboy the default on the
grounds of its superior language purity as a C program and its
development roadmap. It looks like conboy is prepping for the tomboy
online syncing support already.  We should probably be looking at
conboy.

Traditional desktop/laptop users are sort of spoiled in that we have a
lot of system resources to burn so we can mix and match underlying
software frameworks without significant penalty. Diskspace is cheap
for us. But every framework has a cost in terms of system resources.
People who focus narrowly on developing a device platform know this
and they make choices based on established system constraint targets.

The closest thing we have in Fedora as a target system constraint is
cdrom media constraints..and thats a very weak constraint compared to
the sort of platform engineering that Maemo devs have to do...or the
OLPC devs have to do...or the Moblin devs have to do.

Speaking of Moblin... Is Mono part of the Moblin v2 beta reference?
Anyone writing mono apps for Moblin? Any plans to include mono as
part of the Moblin reference?  python is in the Moblin beta reference
repository..but I don't see mono.

http://repo.moblin.org/moblin/releases/test/beta/os/i586/

Now considering that both the Maemo and Moblin efforts are more
closely aligned to the GNOME Mobile initiative than Fedora is, why
exactly is Fedora being called out on mono?  You'd think the really
big scandal would be Moblin's lack of mono in its reference platform.
Hell I don't even think they have a tomboy-alike application of any
sort yet. Maybe that functionality won't be interesting there. Shrug.

The most important things driving the streamlining and defining a
platform experience around GNOME technologies is happening in the
context of mobile devices..in devices where system resources are
limited. If this is really the device market segment that is set for
widescale linux deployment growth then its going to put pressure on
people to provide a tight platform for resource conservation reasons.
And it seems to me its a forgone conclusion that mono isn't going to
be a part of those emerging platform definitions...regardless of what
Fedora chooses to do in terms of default applications.   Taking the
time issue with Fedora's choices concerning handling of media
constraints sort of missing the bigger picture of what is happening in
terms of mono's lack of adoption as an important platform technology.

-jef