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06 July 2009, 08:27

Debian developer clarifies Mono position

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Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, a Debian developer who stated Debian's position on Mono in the default Debian install last week, has clarified his statement on the issue in a new posting. Reichle-Schmehl, also known as "Tolimar", pointed out that what he wrote reflected the current, rather than the future, state of Debian and noted that since Debian 5.0, Lenny, the installer installs the "gnome" metapackage which includes the Mono based Tomboy, rather than the "gnome-desktop-environment" which does not. Although the latter package is more popular in terms of users, the switch in Lenny does mean the "gnome" package will be installed more often in the future.

The situation, according to Tolimar, is complex and he points out that Tomboy is currently a "recommended" package which he calls a "weak dependency" which can be removed later. The change being discussed by the developers is to add a "hard dependency" on a note-taking package, be that Tomboy or gnote. The posting makes it clear though that no decisions on the future packaging of Tomboy and Mono in Debian's numerous variants of install media (net, CD, DVD, BluRay and a range of desktop environments) have been taken beyond considering that dependency change.

Tolimar points out though that if a user installs GNOME with Debian, then there is a likelihood that Tomboy will be installed. But rather than "Debian will install Mono by default", he believes the more accurate statement is "Debian might install Mono with its GNOME install media, but that can still change".

(djwm)

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