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Date:      Fri, 17 Jun 2016 23:41:11 +0200
From:      Mathieu Prevot <mathieu.prevot@gmail.com>
To:        Ivan Radovanovic <radovanovic@gmail.com>
Cc:        Russell Haley <russ.haley@gmail.com>, romain@freebsd.org,  Freebsd-mono <freebsd-mono@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: maintaining ports and mono
Message-ID:  <CAP8XrcuNNGrEP4qMi%2B2tps02b3VC32Qp-4kGCYgBUGC%2BVQ7Jaw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <5763A1F6.9090501@gmail.com>
References:  <CAP8Xrcs7DTM-y2QqZY3sTRX2GzRKpOGOSHK%2BZXTkY09Txq6YoQ@mail.gmail.com> <CABx9NuTr0UqTUKe8_yY45F0eHhhNhE8xarqGcvbukxSU5ETMCg@mail.gmail.com> <CAP8XrcttkJ0AOPW0L1OfdYrceryaRQZE4knhgF-8QhFP-=x3vQ@mail.gmail.com> <5763A1F6.9090501@gmail.com>

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2016-06-17 9:08 GMT+02:00 Ivan Radovanovic <radovanovic@gmail.com>:

> On 06/16/2016 21:53, Mathieu Prevot napisa:
>
>>
>>
>> 2016-06-16 20:08 GMT+02:00 Russell Haley <russ.haley@gmail.com
>> <mailto:russ.haley@gmail.com>>:
>>
>>     Hi Mathieu,
>>
>>     I have expressed interest in helping maintain mono on FreeBSD but have
>>     moved away due to lack of interest and support. Currently someone has
>>     ported more recent versions of Mono (Romain I think?), but MonoDevelop
>>     is somewhat out of date. I had patches to build MonoDevelop with
>>     Rolsyn but couldn't get the MonoDevelop github repos to work with
>>     FreeBSD ports so I gave up after multiple requests for help on both
>>     this mailing list and the FreeBSD forum.
>>
>>     Other .Net things I'd like to see:
>>     - Ivan had some patches for kqueue issues, he passed them on to me but
>>     again, I have moved away from .net on FreeBSD
>>     - I would like to see a port of Pinta on FreeBSD
>>     (https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/) because gimp makes me
>>     want to throw my computer
>>     - I once built and ran .Net Core and would like to see if that has
>>     progressed, perhaps put together a FreeBSD port for it. The ultimate
>>     goal in my mind is to update MonoDevelop to use .net Core
>>     - Porting and testing asp.net <http://asp.net>; and MVC to FreeBSD
>>     - Testing the latest mono on FreeBSD CURRENT for ARM
>>
>>     I had also at one point seen a possible business model helping clients
>>     get their .net software off of Windows to save $$$ and create
>>     resalable appliances, but that idea died on the vine.
>>
>>     Ultimately, there are so many development options on FreeBSD, I moved
>>     to something that was better supported (lua), but I really really miss
>>     that big beautiful framework. I guess there's always Java, or Python,
>>     or Ruby... :(
>>
>>
>> There are many points here, from .NET to IDEs and business.
>>
>> IMHO having .NET framework work is good, APS.NET <http://APS.NET>; too.
>> Ultimately, having WPF too would be amazing. I'm planing to probe this
>> with the WPF team.
>> There is request on UserVoice (Microsoft interface for feedback and
>> features requests) of opening WPF sources, which is possible.
>> Microsoft recent policy is to make Windows the #1 platform for software
>> development, and have GNU tools work natively in Windows.
>> Their Azure platform now supports FreeBSD 10.3 VM.
>> Despite everything, they will want probably to make sure Windows still
>> have competitive advantages, making the WPF and ASP.net not that likely
>> to be available/ported/opened.
>>
>> Historically and to my knowledge, GNU/Linux was used for desktop at
>> Google, and FreeBSD rather for servers. Having FreeBSD a stronger dev
>> platform is questionable and might require a lot of energy/time/effort
>> from the community.
>>
>> Have you tried java/javaFX/openGL ?
>>
>> M
>>
>>
> Hi Mathieu,
>
> IMHO opinion there is no interest to have Mono running properly on FreeBSD
> from either side. Original mono developers are even proud to say they don't
> care about having it run on *BSD,
>

Do you have reference to such thing ? list archive ? I think it might be
right in the past, the teams might have changed, and the mindset might have
changed, and ultimately, does it matter ?


> and I guess based on amount of feedback you got on this list you can draw
> your own conclusions about enthusiasm coming from this side.
>

I understand this too. However, people are not necessarily fast and
everything. People have also their own projects, preoccupations,
availability / will / time. I give few days to get the temperature of the
community.

My mindset is not: do we need this, but rather: what can we do with this ?
and: which opportunities does this brings to FreeBSD ?
And then: what am I willing to give in term of time/energy for this ?

For enterprise purposes, often productivity comes first, and results,
warranties comes first, and in that case, people are willing to pay (say
Microsoft) to have a certain level of productivity and results.

Then there is their policy: do we spend more money on dev man power, or
more in proprietary software, or hardware ? just policy, IMO.


> We at company still have some production ASP.Net applications we are
> running using mono/FreeBSD with some patches I wrote both for mono and
> their fastcgi server, but AFAIK those never found their way either to
> FreeBSD port or main mono repository, and I really don't have enough time
> to spend it convincing people to use free source I wrote - what is
> interesting web server patches fix some OS independent bugs with socket
> handling they have, but maybe they thought they were also FreeBSD related
> :-)
>

Sounds really good :) Do you have an idea of the amount of lines / hours to
do such thing ? I keep all that in mind ! I keep probing and will come back
to you. Many thanks for proposing this.


> I think there is also problem with attitude with mono guys - it seems
> there is perception (as you put it in "GNU/Linux was used for desktop at
> Google, and FreeBSD rather for servers") that there is no need to actually
> have .Net running on FreeBSD, but according to my experience serious use of
> .Net is in web applications, and that is server side usage.
>

I see. Again, do you have archives about this ? when this happened ?
If Microsoft is interested, they might influence the Mono community : they
sponsor them.


> Anyway, in company we are not using C# for any new development (we
> switched back to C++), but we stayed with FreeBSD (I guess for us the only
> way to have stable mono on FreeBSD would be to fork entire project, and
> that would require manpower we don't have at the moment).
>

C# have many serious advantages such as linq, tasks, GC, the VM and many
things of a modern object oriented language. To me it's one of the most
pleasant language to work with, as a programmer. Then yes, the ecosystem
matters first.

Many thanks for the opinion and details.

Cheers
M



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