Mono was orphaned last year, and I took over its maintenance because I rely on it to run some non-free video games (not redistributable, so not packaged into Debian), so I can unvendor the Mono runtime shipped with these games and use the Debian-provided runtime instead.
What this means is that my interest as a maintainer is mostly focused on the runtime binaries and libraries, to the exclusion of anything related to using Mono as a development platform. Sadly this (the development platform) is taking a big part of what the packaging is about, and I end up working alone on something I have no real interest in and get no fun from. So at first I was simply thinking about removing mono-devel and all libmono*-dev libraries after Trixie release, keeping only the runtime packages. But I got some feedback from people who would really like to keep the ability to develop Mono software on Debian, and would rather keep these libraries packaged. In addition, there are still 14 reverse build-dependencies on mono-devel: - cecil - de4dot - dnlib - gnome-subtitles - hexbox - keepass2 - keepass2-plugin-keepassrpc - log4net - nini - openmcdf - opentk - quickroute-gps - repetier-host - smuxi Since I do not really have the motivation nor the skills to keep maintaining this development platform, all of these would have to go away if I stay alone in the so-called Debian Mono "Team". On the other hand, if other people *really* want to keep the ability to build Mono/C# software relying on Debian-provided package, I’m more than willing to share the load and restore the "Team" part in "Debian Mono Team". Even if you don’t have time to dedicate to long term maintenance, drive-by contributions would be most welcome. If the state of these packages is improved, it would lead to a much lighter maintenance burden afterwards, and might restore the motivation that I am now lacking. Here are examples of tasks that could be picked up and would help me a lot: - bugs triage, many are really old and might no longer apply to the build of Mono currently shipped in Debian - patches clean up, the current state is many patches maintained as git branches and several others as diffs in debian/patches. I would like the git-based ones to all be converted into individual diffs tracked in debian/patches - lintian clean-up (adding overrides is not cleaning-up), the current tracker page reports 2 errors and 407(!) warnings - maintenance takeover of orphaned Mono build-dependencies: cli-common and libgdiplus In addition, even if mono-devel is going to stay, another less impactful removal I was planning is the alternative Boehm garbage collector, in favour of keeping only the default SGen one. Would anyone be missing this GC if it were to go? If no one manifests any interest in helping with Mono maintenance, I plan to start removing packages after the release of Trixie. Whatever happens, *nothing* is going to be removed from Trixie, but please don’t wait until Forky is almost there before reacting. At this point it is going to be far too late. If I am to go further with the removal, I will open bugs against the affected packages probably sometime around the release of Trixie. PS: No need to keep all the CC emails if the discussion keeps going, I only added them to send a ping to all people who manifested interest on this topic or are maintaining a package that would be affected by this removal. On the other hand, please keep me as CC, as I am not subscribed to this mailing list yet.
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