Well hello there. A couple of days ago my debian.org account was created, meaning that I'm one1 of the crop of current new Debian Developers. Actually the news was broken to me by Rhonda when I attached to irssi after arriving at work, a nice surprise

<Rhonda> All congratulate Laney on becoming a Debian Developer.  ;)
* Rhonda . o O ( http://db.debian.org/search.cgi?dosearch=1&uid=laney )
<Laney> Rhonda: I did?!?!?!

I'll quickly introduce myself by paraphrasing from the background section of the AM report before letting you go about your business. I apparently submitted my first thrilling patch to the alsa-tools package in Ubuntu on February 2nd, 2008. This was sponsored into Hardy by Daniel Chen. Thereafter followed a myriad of exciting patches to various packages that somehow managed to convince a bunch of people that I had enough skill to become an Ubuntu developer. Fast forward a while and I get sucked into the world of Debian packaging by the CLI/Mono strike force of Mirco Bauer and Jo Shields by way of the Mono 2.0 transition. This was where I got my first Debian upload, and it was in this team that I fully realised both the excellence and importance of Debian in the FOSS world2. At some point the Debian Haskell Group formed and I've been involved to some extent there all along too. What I've mainly learned from these two groups is that team maintenance is a really great way to look after a bunch of related packages. When I see people touting new packages about, I often recommend that they look at the list of teams to find a nice home. Perhaps one or two actually did. Thanks to everyone who's supported me so far. I hope to be able to do the same for others in the future.

Guido Trentalancia started an interesting discussion on the SE Linux policy development list about how to manage the evolution of the policy [1]. The Problem The SE Linux policy is the set of rules that determine what access is granted. It assigns types to files and domains to processes and has a set of rules that specify all the permitted interactions between processes and files (among many other things). The policy evolves over time to match the requirements of programs (applications and daemons). As a program evolves the things that it does will change and the SE Linux policy will tend to evolve to permit the set of all operations that were requested by all versions because people only complain when things stop working not when excessive privilege is granted. So we need to periodically remove old allow rules from the policy. One difficulty in this regard is the fact that multiple versions of programs are often available for use at the same time. Debian in particular has a good history of providing separate packages for the old and new versions of programs such as Apache to meet the needs of users who want the tried and tested version and of users who want the newer version with better performance, more features, better documentation, or something else good. There is also a demand to have the same policy work with multiple versions of a distribution without excessive effort. Finally all the distributions that have SE Linux support have different people deciding when the new version of a daemon is ready for inclusion and therefore there is a need to support multiple versions for multiple distributions. So support for older versions of daemons can t be removed easily. One of the things I do to make these things a little easier to manage is to put ifdef( distro_debian', before any Debian specific bits of policy. When policy is conditional and only used in Debian I can freely remove it at any future time if Debian works well without it. Also it doesn t matter if such Debian specific policy allows access that is not needed or desired in other distributions, the only down-side to this is that sometimes other distributions need to repeat work that I did, they determine what access is needed for their configuration and discover that it was already enabled for Debian. What is Valid Policy? We went to only have Valid Policy (as described by Christopher J. PeBenito), so the challenge is determining what is Valid Policy. It seems to me that there are three type of access granted by valid policy (it is debatable whether type #3 is valid):

1. Access that is needed for an application to perform it s minimal designed task.
2. Access that is needed for the application to perform all the optional configurations, EG an ftpd running from inetd or as a daemon, and daemons like http server being granted access to ssl keys or not.
3. Access that is needed to perform all the operations the application requests, but which the application doesn t require or shouldn t require if it worked correctly.

Some common operations that aren t required include opening utmp for write, searching /root, and many other relatively innocuous access attempts which don t affect the program operation if they are denied. There are also many things such as writing temporary files to /root that don t seem unusual if the application developer is not considering SE Linux (but which are often considered bad practice anyway). Some of these things (like using /root for stuff that belongs in /var/lib) have the potential to break things (for the daemon or for other system processes) even if you don t consider SE Linux. How to deal with those types:

1. In most cases this can be determined without too much effort. For example a web server needs to listen on port 80 and read files and directories that relate to data. When writing policy I can write a lot of the allow rules without even testing the application because I know from the design what it will do. A large part of the other access is obvious in a I can t believe I didn t realise it would need this sense.
2. The main question here is whether we have booleans (settings which can be tuned at run-time by the sysadmin which determine how the policy works) to specify which optional tasks or whether we allow all access for optional configurations by default. The secondary question is when certain unusual corner cases should be not supported at all such that the people who do such unusual corner cases need to use audit2allow to generate local policy to allow their operations.
3. Sometimes we have to allow things that we really don t like. Even when we write policy to allow a daemon to do unusual things (such as using /root instead of /var/lib) it s still a lot better than running without SE Linux. Also SE Linux policy to allow such obviously broken things stands out and is a constant reminder that the daemon needs fixing, this is better than allowing symptoms of broken design to be forgotten.

How to Improve the Situation We could have comments in the policy source for everything that is in category 3. If the comments had a fixed format so that a recursive grep could find them all then it would allow us to more easily remove the gross things from the policy at a later date. But it seems to me that the main problem is a lack of people working on this. I am not aware of any people actively testing Debian policy for excessive privilege in regard to such issues.

• [1] http://oss.tresys.com/pipermail/refpolicy/2011-March/004115.html

Most probably haven't noticed yet but I finished the Mono 2.10.1 debian packaging effort of the past 3 months and uploaded it to Debian/Experimental. With Mono 2.10 I had to make the biggest changes in Mono packaging since the big Mono 2.0 upload. The runtime no longer supports the 1.0 and 2.0 runtime profile, instead it now supports the 2.0 and 4.0 runtime profile. This meant I had to drop all libmono*1.0-cil packages and add libmono*4.0-cil packages. This sounds like a lot of s/1.0/4.0/ work but it actually wasn't. Mono 2.10 ships a lot of new libraries over 2.6 and I had again to decide where they should go. "Where should this $library go?" I have been playing this game for the past 7 years maintaining Mono and I finally gave up on it... What, where, when, why? I could give now a 2 hours talk of the issues behind the current packaging approach (keeping the number of library packages low) but instead I will do something else. Please, just take a look at this picture for a second: If your browser crashed, your eyes hurt or your brain simply melted, I think you have got the idea. The Big Split The cure? cli-common-dev! This is a package that contains 2 extremely important debhelper packaging tools for packaging Mono/CLI related packages called dh_makeclilibs and dh_clideps. If you don't know these, they do exact the same thing as dh_makeshlibs and dh_shlibdeps do. dh_makeclilibs generates library dependency tracking information and dh_clideps consumes that information to automatically generate the package dependencies for you. So each library of the 4.0 runtime profile has now it's own package, simple as that, the rest does cli-common-dev for me and you. "Hey, that Mono packaging bastard is polluting the Debian archive because of his laziness!" No, I am not. This packaging change not only has the advantage of simplifying the packaging and with that bringing new Mono versions faster to you but also reduces the typical install size for applications as they will only pull in the really used libraries of Mono instead of groups of them. I don't have any numbers handy right now as none of the applications are built against Mono 2.10 (yet), but when the transition starts we will get numbers. New Features There is also a new SGen flavor of Mono available called mono-runtime-sgen which is no longer using the conservative non-generational Boehm's garbage collector but SGen which is a simple generational garbage collector with promising advantages. And here some more Mono 2.8/2.10 news from /usr/share/doc/mono-runtime/NEWS.Debian.gz:

• SGen Precise Stack Scanning
• Enhanced SIMD with new methods for Vector data type conversions and swapping elements in vectors
• ASP.NET MVC 3.0 (not included, only supported)
• The C# Interactive Shell can now be used as shebang: #!/usr/bin/csharp
• .NET 4.0 runtime
• C# 4.0 compiler
• ASP.NET 4.0
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
• System.Data.Services.Client (OData)
• glib was replaced with eglib
• Removed .NET 1.1 runtime

Architecture Regressions With the initial upload of Mono 2.10.1 to Debian/Experimental the architecture world broke apart and it regressed on all Mono architectures except for i386 and amd64 There is a reason it's called experimental isn't there? In mono 2.10.1-3 I could solve all regressions except for kfreebsd-* and armel. Jo Shields fixed the remaining regressions and the world started to look good again in mono 2.10.1-4! He also took care of mono-basic, mod-mono and xsp, but mod-mono and xsp are still waiting for the translation call deadline to pass by so they can also be uploaded to Debian/Experimental. Planned Transition As mentioned above, there will be a Mono 2.10 transition needed when the packages hit Debian/Unstable. There is no ETA yet on this when it will happen as I have to coordinate this with debian-release first. But as things are not showtime ready in experimental anyhow, this will not happen too soonish. The Mono 2.10 transition plan will be covered in a following post. GIVMENOWPLX OMG, all this rumbling about Mono 2.10 and I still haven't said a word on how to obtain it, sorry about this, just do this and I will shut up now:

echo "deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install -t experimental mono-complete

(this is the easiest way of getting only mono 2.10.1 from experimental)

Yes, it's that time of the year: I am blogging. I was using Jaws as my blogging tool and CMS for the past few years more or less and I am finally switching to something new. I was running a SVN snapshot of Jaws and haven't updated nor maintained that one for about 3 years. This reduced my abilility to blog a lot as I had to look after bugs and jumping through the hoops to make a post. At some point I wanted to replace Jaws with something better that fits my needs but didn't find anything. I have been keeping an eye on Joey Hess' ikiwiki for quite some time, but never felt the desire to blog something important and thus postponed solving my website mess. For those who don't know ikiwiki yet, it is a wiki compiler based on a version control system like git which generates the website when you push your commits to the git repository. The wiki uses the markdown syntax but also supports other engines. ikiwiki is written in Perl which is not my favourite language, but I have seen worse. When I wrote the Debian packaging tools for the Common Language Infrastructure, which are based on debhelper, I had to study code written by Joey Hess. Putting the syntax aside (I mean it's Perl, it can't be beautiful because of that) he does well designed and implemented software and this is the reason ikiwiki is a great candidate despite the used language. Jo Shields suggested dogfeeding myself with a .NET based blog, but ASP.NET is just junk, but with Manos de Mono I am actually considering it! Manos is written in beautiful C# without any ASP.NET close to it, but is extremely new and has no blogging or wiki engine written for it yet. I was involved in Jaws's development and I didn't want to run into the same issue again for now (more hacking the tools, less using them). So last night I finally made the decision, installed ikiwiki and made my first post with it, yay! The markdown syntax feels very naturaly to me. I usually end up searching for the syntax documentation every 2nd paragraph, but not on this one...

Hear me ramble about Mono on This Week In Debian for a half-hour! Go on, hear me! [MP3][Ogg]

If you ve ever gotten tired of waiting for a new Mono release to appear, and taken matters into your own hands by compiling your own copy of Mono, you ve likely faced the problem of missing libraries. That s weird, it says it can t find gtk-sharp, but I have that package! This happens because every version of Mono on your system has what s called a Global Assembly Cache a location where all system-wide assemblies lives. So when you run an app like Tomboy, it loads its libraries such as GTK# from the GAC belonging to the Mono runtime being used. Ordinarily, this is in /usr/lib/mono/gac on a Debian/Ubuntu system. When you have your parallel Mono, it doesn t share a GAC as a result, libraries in your main distro GAC are not available in your DIY GAC, as they were never registered in there. Typically, the advice is to either start compiling every lib you need into a non-standard place too however, here s a better idea. Why not make Apt take care of not only your system s GAC but additional GACs too? We actually have structures in place to handle this, so it s not as hard as you think (merely relatively unknown). This guide does NOT take startup scripts into account it s your problem to ensure you re using the correct mono command to run your copy of MonoDevelop or Tomboy or whatever. You should probably learn about update-alternatives and $PATH for this. Oh, and this guide will BREAK HORRIBLY if you try to uninstall system mono completely. Don t try it. Setup step 1: preparation Don t install parallel Mono into /usr/local. I don t care what happens to you if you do. Use some random folder in /opt, usually a per-build prefix like /opt/mono-2.10 Setup step 2: duplicating existing magic Open a terminal, and copy /usr/share/cli-common/runtimes.d/mono to a new filename, e.g. /usr/share/cli-common/runtimes.d/mono-2.10 Setup step 3: tweak duplicate magic Open your copied file in an editor, and change the name value on line 27ish (e.g. from Mono\n to Mono (parallel 2.10 install)\n ). Then change the two places in the file, on lines 64ish and 120ish, from /usr/bin/gacutil to /opt/mono-2.8.2/bin/gacutil or equivalent. Setup step 4: apply magic to existing packages Run /usr/share/cli-common/gac-install mono-2.10 (or whatever filename you picked for your runtimes.d entry) as root. This will instantiate your parallel GAC(s). From now on, every GAC library you install or uninstall will happen to every single runtime in runtimes.d. To go back to how things were before, with only a single Mono runtime: Uninstall step 1: empty out parallel GAC Run /usr/share/cli-common/gac-remove mono-2.10 (or whatever filename you picked for your runtimes.d entry) as root. This will remove all packaged entried from your parallel GAC(s). Uninstall step 2: remove magic Delete your file from runtimes.d

Not for the first time, I ve seen the suggestion in the echo chamber that Mono packages should be moved from Debian into the non-free repository, which is not formally part of Debian. The reason, as it so often is, is patents specifically this time, the searing risk posed to Debian and its users that Mono s packaging does not (and technically could not without forking from upstream) provide base class libraries which implement only the content of ECMA-335 4th Edition. As I understand it, this implies three things about the suggestion/demand: firstly, that the individual in question believes that Mono end users are at risk from patent litigation from Microsoft Corp because Mono s implementation of Microsoft.NET beyond the content of ECMA 334/335 infringes on Microsoft patents; secondly, that the Microsoft Community Promise which promises not to assert legal claims over third party implementations of ECMA-335 4th Edition (and ECMA-334 4th Edition which defines the C# language) would render a pure ECMA-only runtime safe if it existed (which it does not); thirdly that without the protection offered by the Microsoft Community Promise, the source code licenses of Mono are irrelevant the patent risk renders the software non-Free. It appears, unfortunately, that the community of Free Software Advocates don t actually understand what Free Software actually IS. That explains an awful lot, but should surprise nobody. So here s a lesson on what, exactly, is being advocated for. The Free Software Foundation defines four Software Freedoms these are the minimum criteria required for something to be considered Free Software by the FSF:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Other groups have their own variants on these, but those are really just clarifications on the FSF definition - for example, the Debian Free Software Guidelines mostly line up, but have some additional clauses such as clause 4 which allows software to be considered Free if source code may be redistributed without modifications, as long as patches may be shipped alongside. These four freedoms are offered to you by the software s copyright holders only, and apply regardless of their choice of license any Free license, from a lengthy legal tome like the MPL to the completely-Free WTFPL, will offer you these four basic freedoms as a minimum, and any additional clauses in their licenses cannot seek to restrict these freedoms. These four freedoms represent the beginning, and end, of whether a piece of software is Free or not. Software does not need to be developed in the open, in a community-responsive way, in order to qualify as Free projects such as Google s Android, which are developed under a throw a final release over the wall, bugs and all, and expect people to thank you for it model, are still free, even if contribution is difficult. Actually, on a related note, software does not need to solicit upstream contribution of any kind in order to qualify as Free as long as you personally can redistribute the code with changes, then that s enough. Software does not need to serve a fully or even partially legal purpose in order to qualify as Free the favoured tool for causing distributed denial of service attacks, Low Orbit Ion Cannon, is Free Software, even though realistically it serves no legal purpose. DeCSS, the code initially used to allow DVD media to play on Linux (by breaking the CSS encryption mechanism) is Free Software. Software does not need to be useful or tasteful in order to qualify as Free the Last Measure Operating System, a minimalist OS primarily designed to loudly display the famous shock site images from goatse and related, is Free Software. Even in somewhat less clear-cut cases of taste, your personal opinion of software has no bearing on whether it is Free Software, as long as the four freedoms are guaranteed by the author(s). Software does not need to have only Free dependencies to qualify as Free Software it is entirely permissible to write software which relies upon a non-Free framework or library, and release your code under a Free license. It is the downstream recipient s problem to provide the dependencies, including their choice to craft a Free replacement for any non-Free code you make use of. Debian has a special repository called contrib, where Free software which only works with non-Free data, lives for example, Free game engines which require the insertion of proprietary game data in order to operate. You could write Free addons for expensive proprietary software such as Matlab, and as long as your code is Free, your responsibilities are met. Software does not need to avoid patents software, algorithmic, or otherwise in order to qualify as Free. The Freetype font library was still entirely Free Software when Apple were slinging threats around regarding font hinting data. FFmpeg, the Swiss Army knife of media codec libraries, is Free Software regardless of the number of codec patents it breaks. Software does not need any third party approval to be Free Software the rights of Free Software can only be offered by the copyright holders, and the opinion of third parties is an irrelevance as to whether software is Free. The GPL d clone of Blizzard Entertainment s Battle.net servers, bnetd, is Free Software, regardless of legal takedown notices. Third parties cannot influence whether or not a piece of software is Free. They can influence tangentially related topics, such as whether the software can be legally used, but that s the limit. And even within a given piece of software, where copyright is shared by contributors, the author of one component has no say on other components. And you can t make code which is already released as Free, suddenly un-Free you can, if you hold all the copyrights, close up future versions, but your existing code remains Free forever. Reasonably, you can opt to avoid using a piece of software because you have requirements beyond it merely being Free Software Cdrtools has been avoided in Debian for a long time due to the upstream author s legal threats and rambling but that is a side issue as to the question of whether or not the software is Free. Patents are simply not involved in the question of whether or not something is Free Software, except for one narrow case: where Free Software is released by somebody who also holds related patents, and uses a license such as Ms-PL or Apache 2.0 or GPLv3 which requires them to also release those patents to those using/distributing the software. Outside that narrow situation, patents do not relate to the question of whether something is Free Software even if a company releases some source code under a license like BSD then demands patent fees from end users. So, on to the original topic of Mono. Every piece of Mono s source code is released by its authors under a license which guarantees the FSF s Four Freedoms. Whether or not you find Mono useful or tasteful does not affect that Free status. Whether or not Mono infringes upon any laws or patents does not affect that Free status. That Mono contains some libraries whose upstream author is Microsoft does not give Microsoft even the remotest claim to a single line of code outside the code they wrote and even then, it wouldn t be an issue, since the licenses they use are Free. In fact, both the licenses used in the Microsoft portions of the source base make patent grants to all users, in addition to guaranteeing the FSF s Four Freedoms and any license contamination would decrease, not increase, any risk of legal attack from Microsoft. There s even plenty of Microsoft code available for re-use at a lower level than the currently re-used libraries: The Microsoft.NET Micro Framework (for use on embedded platforms direct to the metal) is under the Free Software Apache 2.0 license, and would provide access to some of Microsoft s runtime and class library code, complete with a patent grant, if it were desired. Please try to keep your thought processes straight. If you want to argue that you re all for Free Software, please remember that there s plenty of Free Software you might not approve of and don t claim to be a Free Software advocate then use bogus arguments to claim that Free Software is not Free. Free Software includes LMOS and LOIC and Mono, whether you like it or not.

I ve never quit a job before. Well, not a real job. Quitting PC World was more than easy, it was practically required for my soul not to leave my body. Quitting Waitrose was, well, it was a freaking supermarket job. And Southampton football stadium I just stopped turning up after one girl fainted in the kitchen from heat exhaustion. But a real, proper handing in of notice is something new in no small part because I ve been in the same place since my first job as a new graduate. Not that I m ungrateful, mind. Looking after big iron at the University of Oxford has been pretty awesome more blinky lights than you can shake a stick at but there comes a time when you need to think about your career, and move on to pastures new. I m fairly sure six and a bit years is WELL past that point. When I started looking at work, I had only a few mandatory criteria a sysadmin job, working with Free Software, without any significant decrease to my monthly income. Beyond that well, in this economy, who am I to argue? What I hadn t accounted for, however, was a job whose awesomeness can t be contained. A job with a dedicated Free Software company whose entire staff roster, top to bottom, is filled with the most talented, smart, and generally awesome people you could hope to work with. Such a job would be a fevered dream, the mere ramblings of a madman. Yet, somehow, for the second time running, I find myself in an enviable job, working exclusively on Free Software. Being able to show off root access to a box with 256 cores and a tibibyte of RAM is pretty cool. But you know what s even cooler? A job where I never need to worry about openSUSE 10.1 administration ever again. A job where several of my colleagues are fellow Debian Developers, with all the prestige and knowledge that comes with such a title. And somehow, by rolling proverbial twenties, I find myself in that position. I am very, VERY proud to say that from the start of January, I ll be joining Collabora Ltd as their new Systems Manager.

There are corners of the Internest where foolish people congregate, and invent stories. These foolish stories are then read as gospel by trusting people, and reposted, until the original made-up source is concealed from view. As an attempt to stem this flow of disinformation, here are some commonly held but incorrect beliefs about the Mono framework, and an explanation of the reality of the situation, as far as I understand it. The next Mono version is co-developed with Microsoft There is a grain of truth behind this one, but it s a gross mischaracterisation. Mono 2.8, when it ships, will bundle, for convenience, a number of Free Software libraries, which are released by Microsoft under a license considered Free Software by the Free Software Foundation, the Ms-PL. These are:

• System.Web.Mvc and System.Web.Mvc2: ASP.NET MVC, a library for writing ASP.NET web pages with a model-view-controller design, similar to Rails for Ruby. This is not news System.Web.Mvc has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.4.2 (June 25th 2009). System.Web.Mvc2 has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.6.7 (July 14th 2010).
• System.Numerics: Mono re-uses Microsoft s implementation of BigInteger.cs from the Dynamic Language Runtime (see below). This is indeed new to Mono 2.8, as it is part of .NET 4.0 (Mono 2.8 targets .NET 4.0 compatibility by default).
• System.Data.Services.Client: The OData SDK client library. This is indeed new to Mono 2.8.
• System.ComponentModel.Composition: The Managed Extensibility Framework, a library for writing and using plugins. This is similar in scope to the existing Mono.Addins project. This is indeed new to Mono 2.8, although it was added to Mono Trunk in 2009.
• System.Web.Extensions: Microsoft Ajax, a library for using Ajax inside ASP.NET projects. This is not news MicrosoftAjaxLibrary has been bundled in Mono since Mono 1.2.6 (11th December 2007).
• Microsoft.Scripting.Core and Microsoft.Dynamic: The Dynamic Language Runtime is a framework permitting implementation of dynamic languages (such as Python or Ruby) on top of the core .NET runtime. It is used for IronPython and IronRuby, amongst others. The DLR has very recently changed license from Ms-PL to Apache 2.0, but the version bundled in Mono is still under the older license. This is not news the DLR has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.6 (14th December 2009).

So, to summarise, there are five Free Software libraries written by Microsoft under the Ms-PL included in Mono 2.8 but only two of those five are new, and none of them were co-developed in any meaningful sense. Mono development is dead There have been reports that Mono development has ended, on the basis that no commits have been made to Novell s Subversion server for a few weeks. However, these reports miss one minor detail Mono has moved to Github.com. There were 35 commits from 9 different people to the main mono.git repository (of dozens of repositories under the main Mono project) in the last 2 days, at time of writing far from dead. Mono lacks features found in Microsoft.NET Mono lacks libraries found in Microsoft.NET, such as the Windows Presentation Framework GUI toolkit. In terms of features, i.e. things implemented at a compiler or runtime level, Mono is typically more advanced. This is helped in no small part by Mono s Free Software development model, allowing experimentation and what if changes to the core runtime which a sluggish corporate behemoth like Microsoft cannot accommodate. To give three real-world examples, Mono allows embedding of its compiler as a service, and provides a REPL shell this is a planned feature for .NET 5.0, but has been available for years in Mono; Mono.Simd provides a number of data structures which will run on any version of Mono or Microsoft.NET, but will use optimized CPU extensions like SSE when run on a sufficiently new version of Mono, on an appropriate architecture as far as I m aware, there is nothing like this available or planned for Microsoft.NET. Mono is able to produce fully compiled, static executables which do not need to JIT anything at runtime this is used for iPhone compilation, for example, where JITters are not permitted. There is no comparable feature in Microsoft.NET. Clearly, Microsoft.NET can only be thought of as more featureful if one defines features in terms of does it have lots of libraries? in terms of functionality, Mono is ahead. Mono can sneak onto your system without your knowledge If you don t have the mono-runtime package installed, you can t run Mono apps. It is possible to install some Mono apps alongside the awful-yet-popular mononono equivs package, since the popular equivs script fails to place Conflicts on the correct packages (F-Spot will be blocked, Tomboy will not). No package in Debian or Ubuntu embeds its own copy of the Mono runtime, and we have no plans to make any changes to packaging which would allow execution of any C# application without mono-runtime installed. If one is using a different OS, then things may be different e.g. The Sims 3 for Mac & PC uses embedded Mono, which you wouldn t know about without looking. Canonical are pursuing a pro-Mono agenda, and are responsible for it being pushed in Debian Mono development has been happening in Debian for longer than Canonical has existed the first upload was made in April 2002. Ubuntu is made primarily from software already available in Debian deemed of sufficient quality, and when F-Spot and Tomboy became parts of the default Ubuntu desktop system in 2006, both pieces of software were already available in Debian and deemed of sufficient quality. Nobody working on Mono in Debian is paid by Canonical actually, that s not entirely true, three packages related to accessibility are officially maintained by someone who was hired by Canonical after doing the initial packaging work when he worked for Novell. But the Mono runtime itself, Canonical have no influence over its direction in Debian. As for a pro-Mono agenda , they ve always taken an extremely pragmatic approach to language choice, never showing any real preference for one language or another when it comes to app selection. They don t exhibit any overt anti-Mono policies, which is not the same thing. The names of people contributing to Mono in Debian are not secret check the pkg-mono team page on Alioth. The System.Windows.Forms namespace is protected by Microsoft patents The truth is, nobody knows for sure if SWF, or any other part of Mono, or any other framework such as Vala or Python, is covered by Microsoft patents. The way the US patent system is contrived, it is actively dangerous to check whether something contains any patents when you write it, as you are liable for triple damages should it later emerge that there WAS a patent, even if your searching missed the fact. You cannot patent an API or namespace only a specific implementation of a software concept, in those countries where software patents are permitted. There has never been any evidence shown that Mono s implementation of SWF, or indeed any part of Mono, infringes any Microsoft-held patents, because if that were the case, then the code would be rewritten to avoid the issue much like the approach taken by Linux kernel developers when a patent becomes apparent. The belief within the Mono community is that the core parts of Mono as defined in ECMA334/335 are safe (they are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise patent grant); any of the Ms-PL libraries mentioned above is definitely safe (Ms-PL includes an explicit patent grant); and the rest of the package is likely safe too (on the basis that it is a named component of the Open Innovation Network s list of protected software and on the basis that there s unlikely to be anything patentable in one of many implementations of basic ideas like database connectors). Nobody knows for sure, because that s how the system works. But, again, nobody knows for sure that Microsoft patents don t apply to other frameworks such as Python there is simply a belief and an assumption that they do not. MonoDevelop contributors removed GPL code from MonoDevelop, in an attack on the GPL This is somewhat disingenuous, given MonoDevelop is LGPL. The MonoDevelop team excised the remaining GPL code (and there wasn t much of it) in order to grant greater Freedom to developers. Previously, the entire MonoDevelop IDE was a GPL combination, meaning any add-ins for the IDE also needed to be GPL, regardless of developer choice. Now, any developer can write an add-in for MonoDevelop, using the license of their choice, whether another Free license like the Mozilla Public License, or a proprietary closed-source add-in. They are still welcome to produce GPL add-ins, if they want to, as well. Mono won t run random Microsoft.NET apps anyway, so isn t really cross-platform Actually, this one is often true. When developers write apps for Windows primarily, they rarely take the time to think is this the correct way to do it? and will often plough on with an assumption about the Windows way of doing things. It might be simple things like filesystem assumptions (assuming a case-insensitive filesystem, or assuming a backslash is used to separate directories, not a forward slash). It might be more involved, such as using P/Invokes into Windows-specific C libraries, when a more cross-platform alternative is possible. So, often, random applications for Microsoft.NET won t run on Mono. The reverse is also true F-Spot or GNOME Do are fairly heavily tied to Linux (or to UNIX-like OSes with X11, at any rate), through the libraries they invoke being fairly platform-specific. You can write platform-specific Java, with one quick piece of JNI, too. It should be noted, however, that Mono makes the chance of .NET applications being ported to Linux (and/or Mac) much more likely, since even in the worst case scenario, a company only needs to fix a portion of their source to make it cross-platform. The Mono team have a tool called MoMA, which will scan an application and its libraries, and give you detailed reports on the app s portability. This info is used at both ends by app vendors who want to become more portable, and by the Mono team who want to fill in the most frequently encountered blanks. And, it should be stressed, writing cross-platform apps is entirely possible if one desires it e.g. the IRC client Smuxi is pure cross-platform C#, and the executables compiled on Mono on Linux will run fine on Microsoft.NET on Windows. Portability in this direction is important too consider how many people have been introduced to Free Software thanks to availability of Free apps on Windows like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Pidgin or GIMP. You can download Tomboy for Windows, and work is ongoing on fixing Banshee portability issues (which are mostly caused by gStreamer). Mono on Android is a terrible idea which will be super slow There are two efforts to enable developers to write Android applications with Mono a paid proprietary product from Novell called MonoDroid, and an untitled porting effort by big-name Android hacker Koushik Dutta. I have no insight into MonoDroid since it hasn t been released yet, but Koush did some benchmarks of his work which exhibited some remarkable figures compared to Dalvik (and even compared to Sun Java for ARM). Those numbers haven t been updated to reflect the Froyo Dalvik JITter, but Mono on Android is still very exciting from a performance perspective. Mono isn t really Free Software The source code is all available under Free Software licenses. So, um, yes it is. We don t need Mono because we have $LANG By the same logic, we don t need $LANG because we have Mono. By all means, use the language of your choice other developers will use the language of their choice too. If you want to use Vala or Python or Java, then by all means, go ahead. It doesn t mean there s no room for more languages, better suited to other usage patterns. Haskell is great for some types of development, so is Fortran, and so is C#. You might not need Mono because of $LANG, but there are others in the world with different needs. Mono apps are all slow, and crash your computer, and stuff No userland app can crash your Linux system, unless there s a bug in the kernel, or you have some severe problems with your hardware. If you ve ever observed a crash as a result of running a Mono app, then it s really coincidence that Mono is tickling whichever part of your system is busted. As for slow startup time may well be slower than for apps written in C or Vala. There s a delay due to the JITter needing to compile all the libraries used by the application (we may AOT the most common libraries in a future Mono package version, at upstream s recommendation). Once an app is running, it should be fast compared to a Python app, and memory-light compared to a Java app. The new garbage collector in Mono 2.8 should also offer significant improvements to performance, especially under heavy workloads. Ubuntu s default GTK+ themes require Mono This is my favourite recent nonsense to emerge from the Internest. There are reports mostly restricted to IRC and blog comments, that (paraphrasing here) removing Mono removes the Ubuntu themes . Here s the reality: in Ubuntu 10.04, a new visual style was implemented throughout the distro. As part of this, small icons (e.g. notification area icons) were set to be black-and-white by default, and colourised when attention is needed (e.g. the power-off icon turns red when a reboot is needed, the messaging indicator turns green when there s a new message). All of these new monochrome icons are in a package named ubuntu-mono . Removing the ubuntu-mono icon package will also remove the new Ubuntu GTK+ themes, in the light-themes package. So there s your explanation: the themes have a dependence on some monochrome icons, not on the Mono framework.

I ve just made a new release of my GRUB2 gfxmenu themes. This time, there s an Ubuntu Lucid theme. It looks like this: Download it from here as always.

I ve finished uploading the latest version of the cross-platform MonoDevelop IDE to Debian Experimental. MonoDevelop is a full-blown IDE for working on software written in C#, Visual Basic.NET, Python, Vala, Java (via IKVM.NET), C, C++, and Boo. It also integrates support for debugging (both of C-based apps via GDB, and Mono-based apps via MDB or the new Soft Debugger), GUI design of C# apps, version control via Subversion, database querying, unit testing, and more. Oh, and for good luck, I ve also uploaded it to badgerports.org (which should now display okay on smaller displays), for use with Ubuntu 10.04, where support for authoring with Moonlight is included. It ll be in the main Ubuntu 10.10 repository at some point in the future, also with Moonlight support. Enjoy.

In my last post, about GRUB2 theming, there were a few people who were unhappy at the perceived difficulty of creating GRUB2 themes, largely based on the lack of documentation. And to be honest, those people are right if the documentation were complete & correct when I started, then I wouldn t have ended up bumping into all the bugs I did. So, to help on that front and to help kick-start GRUB2 theming in general, I m announcing Larval. More GRUB2 themes means more awesome-looking systems in the wild. Hopefully the GRUB2 upstream will embrace it as a project to help raise the profile and potential of GRUB2. It didn t take me long to realise the most obvious way to develop such an editor: GRUB2 s canvas-based layout system has an awful lot in common with XAML, so the obvious choice was to develop using Silverlight (or, more specifically, Gtk.Moonlight). Larval s internal theme format is XAML files, which are then exported to (and imported from) GRUB2 s simple text based files. The biggest piece of work, to be honest, is the Managed implementation of a PF2 font reader/writer, so you can design a theme using the regular TrueType fonts of your choice, then have them automatically ported to PF2 format as required. I look forward to plenty of community input on Larval, once it reaches a point where I m sufficiently pleased with my (Ms-PL licensed) code to share it with the world. Until then, you ll have to make do with the above screenshot!

Yay! The dlr-languages package has been migrated to testing, which means that it will be included in squeeze, the next release of Debian. Jo has uploaded the -2 version and it is now in sid. This version addresses the issues brought up in the Ubuntu Feature Freeze exception (FFe) bug, so I expect that it will be accepted shortly. Still lots of ifs , but this is pretty exciting for me, since this is my first debian package, and I ve been intending to get it in for over two years. I m not just sitting on my hands while this happens. I ve been working with Ivan, Ankit, Dino and Michael to get the next version of the package put together. I m currently merging Ivan s latest branch into the changes I ve made for DFSG compliance. Dino recommended that the next release include IronRuby 1.0 and IronPython 2.6.1, which should be released by upstream around the middle of April.

I m happy to announce that after the filing of an Intent to Package and nearly 2 years of work, IronRuby 0.9, IronPython 2.6b2, and the DLR are now in Debian. To my knowledge, this is the first package in Debian with direct and active upstream support from Microsoft. Kudos for this release go to Jo Sheilds (package sponsorship & mentoring), Mirco Bauer (package sponsorship & mentoring), Matthias Klose (IronPython package review), Ivan Porto Carrero (IronRuby build/test support), Jim Deville (IronRuby build/test support), Jimmy Schementi (upstream point of contact @ Microsoft), Dino Viehland (IronPython build/test support), Michael Foord (IronPython build/test support), Marek Safar (mono c# compiler support), Ankit Jain (xbuild support), the folks on OFTC s #debian-cli, Freenode s #ironruby and GimpNet s #mono, and the folks on the IronRuby and IronPython mailing lists. This is my first package in Debian, too. I m pretty ecstatic ;)

There s been a fair deal of talk on the intertubes lately about prettifying the boot process. The first I saw was a post from Lasse Havelund regarding a proposal for Ubuntu Lucid, and the second was regarding a forked version of GRUB2 called BURG, which adds some theming abilities. A tiny bit of research revealed that despite the existence of BURG, the regular upstream GRUB2 project already has graphical theme support, courtesy of a Google Summer of Code project by Colin Bennett (albeit with a few less features at time of writing). Since Lasse had gone to the hard work of actual design, I decided to try my hand at chopping his design up into a usable GRUB2 theme, and the result can be seen here. I ended up speaking with the upstream GRUB2 team (which has certainly lead to a strange alliance in one case) about Colin s GSOC themes, and as it turns out, the main reason there s no theme supplied with GRUB2 is that Colin s themes use non-Free elements (proprietary fonts like Helvetica are used heavily). Since I had learnt the theme format to a basic degree in doing my Ubuntu theme, I proposed making a genuinely Free theme starting with a Debian theme, and moving on to a generic GRUB2 theme afterwards. As I went along, I found a handful of bugs and feature oddities, which have almost all been fixed with incredible turnaround by Vladimir Serbinenko, the current maintainer of the gfxmenu code (there remain some questions regarding RTL support in themes, and how to gracefully deal with different aspect ratios) and I want to extend my thanks to him for his help. However, at this point in time, I m pleased to announce a theme I d consider ready for public consumption. It s obviously not perfect, and it uses the old visual style from Debian Lenny, but it s a fully Free starting point, which hopefully can be deconstructed by others seeking to make their own themes. It ought to scale fully to any 4:3 resolution. And it may explode and eat your disk on any version of GRUB2 Experimental other than r1499. Generally, the README is a good starting point. Oh yes, an URL. Try http://retro.apebox.org/grubthemes/ I ve been speaking with some folks on deviantART regarding using their Debian-themed wallpaper in future releases of my themes package, but for now, this should be enough for gfxmenu to get a little more exposure and a little more testing. And, hopefully, shift artist focus back from the theme-incompatible BURG fork to the real GRUB2 project.

I will be at FOSDEM in February next year. It should hopefully be awesome. Anyone who packages Mono on any distro should definitely come, or does any Mono-related stuff in general, since not only will I be there, but the fabulous Mirco Bauer too and perhaps other wonderful people. Definitely a fine use of your moneycash.

I m making a few changes to my online interactions.

• Chicken Little Remix will no longer be updated. There will be no 10.04 from me.
• I will no longer be visiting certain websites, under any circumstances, courtesy of 127.0.0.1 entries in /etc/hosts. This includes sites such as Ubuntu Forums, some blogs, and some news sites.
• I will be blocking some people from Twitter, in order to avoid their @mentions from appearing to me.
• I may (this is undecided) opt to change my anything-goes policy regarding comments on my blog. Redacted comments will have their content deleted, to make it clear that a comment is redacted, not held in moderation

Some things, however, will NOT be changing.

• I will continue my efforts in Debian. In fact, these efforts will be redoubled.
• I will continue my efforts in Ubuntu. In fact, these efforts will be redoubled.
• I will maintain my existing IRC, Twitter, email & IM presence.
• I will, when the opportunity arises, combine sweet and savoury foods.

Thank you for your time.

Bok bok booooook bok bok mono bok bok bkaawk bok bok bok Chicken Little Remix 9.10 Karmic Kraienk ppe Braaaaaaaak bok boooooook bok bok bkaaawk bok bok bok bok bok:

• Bok bok LiveCD
• Wallpaper bkawk bok bok
• Cluck cluck Gnote
• Booooooook bok Solang bok bok bok

Bok bok booooook Mininova: 4577800beda226d815f98bc8d79521cd clr-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso
f97179e5b13f3aceb6c9d98d2c7e6ef5 clr-9.10-desktop-i386.iso Bkaaawk bok bok bok boooooook bok braaawk bok bok booooook bok bok bok 10.04? Bok bok boook charity, bok bok videogames, braaaawk money. Bok bok.

For those who don t follow my exciting life on the IRCosphere or Tweetoscape, I m now officially a Debian Developer, complete with snazzy email address. What this means in real terms is that the pkg-cli-apps, pkg-cli-libs and pkg-mono teams now have a second person with upload rights, alongside the talented but occasionally overworked Mirco Bauer. Which should lower the amount of time that contributor packages and patches spend waiting to be sponsored. As the cool kids say: woo!