Mono required by ubuntu-desktop

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 10:43:45PM +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Steven Harms wrote:
> >This is slowly just becoming a thread on arguing the merits of using the 
> >technology of yesterday.  Last I checked, you can always use Xubuntu or 
> >apt-get remove mono if you are opposed to it, but I am sure the average 
> >user won't take issue with it.
> >
> 
> You cant remove mono if ubuntu-desktop depends on it - it becomes 
> compulsory for everyone regardless of whether they actually run any mono 
> apps.
> 
> I use mono apps on my desktop (2GB Ram) but have found most of them too 
> much for my notepad (256MB  RAM). F-spot in particular can take close to 
> 100MB when importing a modest no of photos and is therefore unsuitable 
> for my notepad.
> 
> Gthumb might not have all the bells and whistles but it is sufficient 
> for my notepad. I would hope Ubuntu respects lower memory machines by 
> not forcing users to use bigger bloated apps in place of more efficient 
> native ones. Is it unreasonable to give us a choice at the desktop level 
> without making mono or its apps compulsory?
> 
> (I guess this will be a dilemma - do you design ubuntu to run on as many 
> machines as possible which means making some of the bigger cooler apps 
> optional or do you cater only for the high end by shipping only the best 
> apps regardless of their size or resource consumption?)

We will ship what we feel to be the optimal tradeoff between resources and
functionality.  Note that Tomboy and Mono consume nothing but disk space
unless you actually run the application, so you don't need to worry about it
on low-memory machines.  OpenOffice.org gets pretty unhappy on such systems
as well.

-- 
 - mdz