OK, here is my feedback to the Mono team regarding my installation
experiences. I hope it doesn't sound too complaining or preachy. The
bottom line is I hope the Mono team will really improve the
installation instructions. I think it is going to be important to the
adoption of Mono for people to be able to get it up and running,
regardless of their distro or, for example, which freakin' version of
glibc they have installed. Ultimately I'd like to see Mono be more
configuration tolerant and install all the necessary dependencies its
needs. At the very least, the instructions should be much more helpful
than they are about exactly what the dependencies are, and where to get
them.
The Mono web site is terribly unhelpful, misleading, and just plain
wrong about stuff it tells you.
Let's take this example here. The very first sentence of the RedHat 9
installation page says "The best way to install Mono on your system is
to use Novell's Red Carpet. If you do not already have Red Carpet, you
can download it." The link to download Red Carpet is not helpful at
all. It doesn't tell you which files you need, or what order you need
to install them. My experience has been that installing Red Carpet was
just as difficult as installing Mono without Red Carpet.
But I wonder if your opinion of not using Red Carpet is the majority
opinion on this site. If it is the majority opinion, then why does the
Mono web site continue to recommend using Red Carpet? And once you
install Red Carpet, it still doesn't work, because it doesn't give you
the perl-XML-* stuff that gtk-sharp-gapi needs, and doesn't tell you
where to get it from.
Now you say that compiling from source is better, because that removes
the dependency issues. That has not been my experience at all. I have
tried to compile from source, and I still have dependency problems
(this is especially true for me when I try to compile MonoDevelop,
which is a different mailing list, I know).
Speaking of MonoDevelop, their web site suffers from similar
inaccuracies. They say *not* to compile from source unless you
absolutely have to, and even go on to say that the Mono project web
site contains pre-built binaries!!! Hah. If that's true, I sure
haven't found them.
I do think Mono has a lot of potential to become a mainstream
cross-platform programming platform. I know a lot of people on this
mailing list are doing a lot of really good, hard work. I just hate to
see that effort wasted by poor and inaccurate setup instructions.
- Kevin
On Aug 17, 2005, at 3:35 PM, Paul F. Johnson wrote:
Hi,
I’m trying to install Mono on Red Hat 9 using Red Carpet, because
that’s what the web site says is the best way to do it.
RedCarpet is a pretty cool way of updating things, but really, for Mono
I really would suggest building your own. Simplest reason for doing
this
is that you don't get the deps problems!
TTFN
Paul
--
"A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the
best and then make sure that you are. In my time at Liverpool we always
said we had the best two teams on Merseyside, Liverpool and Liverpool
Reserves." - Bill Shankly
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