Mono 2.10 transition - call for help

[Jo Shields]

As part of Ubuntu 11.10, all Mono packaging in Ubuntu will be undergoing
a few changes - chief amongst these is a move from being compiled
against libraries corresponding to .NET versions 2.0 through 3.5
(default in Ubuntu since Jaunty), to version 4.0. This not only ensures
that developers targeting Ubuntu have access to the latest
functionality, but will also result in a disk-space usage drop once
everything is rebuilt, thanks to some further changes in the Mono
packaging.

Additionally, we now employ more strict checking in our packaging
helpers to watch out for unresolved shared library usage - i.e. if an
app tries to open "libfoo.so" without specifying a required soname, then
package compilation will fail (rather than failing unexpectedly at
runtime months later).

Shepherding the release through these combined transitions is a big
effort, and really needs the loving touch of more than one person on the
Ubuntu side - a lot of initial work has already happened in Debian and
Debian packaging repositories, but the work is not complete.

This is where you come in.

First of all, all *applications* need to cleanly rebuild on Ubuntu
Oneiric. A successfully rebuilt package will have a dependency on
"libmono-corlib4.0-cil". A package which has dependencies on
libmono-corlib2.0-cil in addition to libmono-corlib4.0-cil will need to
be rebuilt a second time, once its build dependencies have been rebuilt
(technical detail on this available on request), which leads on to point
two:

*Libraries* and *plugins* must only be rebuilt after the *applications*
are finished. An application built with 4.0 can open plugins and
libraries built with 2.0 (there's just some wasted package dependencies)
- whereas an application built with 2.0 will crash if any of its plugins
or dependencies are rebuilt with 4.0

More information on the transition is at
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianMonoGroup/Mono210Transition

A rough indication of the current status of the transition in Ubuntu is
at http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/transitions/mono.html -
careful though, the dependency levels it reports are flat-out wrong!

Information on the state of 2.10-readiness in Debian (e.g. which
packages need patching to work) is at
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianMonoGroup/Mono210TransitionTODO

And, in the general case, #debian-cli on OFTC is the place to join if
you want to help get this done. I've been concentrating on some of the
more awkward packages (e.g. MonoDevelop), and could use help with
testing packages marked as fixed in Experimental or fixed in Git.

Thanks

--Jo Shields

p.s. please CC replies, I'm not on either ML.
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