The state of Mono 2.6 on FreeBSD
Long time no post... Well, I an writing a serie of articles about NFC and it takes me a lot of time, not mentioning I still do many other things in parallel. If you are interested in this area, stay tuned ;-)
So apart NFC, what's new with Mono on FreeBSD? First, you wight have seen that mono 2.6 has been released for a while and is still not available in FreeBSD ports. The main reasons are:
- a thread concurrency problem which is still not solved but an ugly workaround have been found;
- a bug (well, a weird implementation) of the new built-in soft-mode debugger that makes it totally useless on amd64. A workaround have been found and in the meantime, the code has been updated upstream and will be part of mono-2.6.2 which will probably be released at the end of the month;
- the moonlight tools (e.g. the smcs.exe compiler) are still part of mono (read the code source is in mono-2.6.tar.bz2) but installed by moonlight (read the Makefiles with install targets are in moonlight-2.0.tar.bz2). This leads to some juggling which is in progress (read: I can build and install it on my system, Firefox segfaults when I browse a website with Silverlight contents, and configure fails in Tinderbox because it cannot find bison, which is however installed according to the logs).
I will not mention here the mono-basic-2.6.tar.bz2 source tarball that exists besides the moonlight-2.0.tar.bz2 tarball in the moon(light) source directory and the mono-basic-2.6.tar.bz2 source tarball in the mono-basic directory having different dates & checksums… Lot of fun to come I guess.
Once these various problems have been fixed, you can expect mono-2.6 to reach the ports, promptly followed by the last version of the MonoDevelop IDE which is quite lovely.
Last but not least, I am now a ports committer and flz@ is my mentor.
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