Re: About the status of Microsoft .NET

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Fri, 15 Dec 2023 11:06:44 -0500
bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:
> FWIW, i did not mention this at the time but i started reviewing it
> back then - it was huge and so it is a daunting task to audit, and i
> was not able to install it from source in a reasonable time;
I looked at it somewhat recently (this year) and the issue is that mono
depends on mono so you can't easily bootstrap it (more on that below).

> "do we actually need this in distros?"; because it was already
> distributed by FSDG in distros - IMHO, the answer was "no, because no
> important applications depend on it; and because i highly doubt that
> people in the *nix world wants to write new applications for it" - so
> from a distro perspective, it is a very low-priority
I think that there are valid use cases for almost all programming
languages that can be used with 100% free software, and so valid
reasons for shipping a given programming language in FSDG distributions.

For instance many years ago I used monodevelop under Parabola just to
pass an exam. Also sometimes people need some free software programs
written in C# for some use cases.

In contrast there are also valid reasons not to ship almost any
package, including programming languages in (FSDG) distributions.

For instance shipping more software increase of maintenance, some
distributions like Hyperbola focus on easier maintenance and LTS
software, etc. 

For mono specifically it cannot be bootstrapped easily, there are some
patent risks, and increased maintenance costs due to patching required
(according to the Parabola bug #2894) so there are valid reasons as well
not to include it.

A good alternative to C# is Vala I think. It has some similarities with
C# but the integration with GNU/Linux is better and some things should
feel more natural to programmers used to GNU/Linux.

> WRT distros today, they still distribute it, but it probably should
> go - that should be discussed on the FSDG mailing list
As I understand the informal consensus is that distributions are free
to choose their own policies with regard to things like patents.

> some parabola bug reports:
> https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/1794
This seems related to the fact that you need a mono binary to bootstrap
mono. As I understand the free software directory isn't concerned with
that issue but some (not all) FSDG distributions are.

If someone wants to ship Mono in Parabola an easy way to fix it could
be to make a package that first downloads the mono binaries to
bootstrap mono, install but not ship the resulting package and then use
it to build a second package that doesn't download binaries but use the
previously built mono instead.

Once this is done people can use the newer package to build the next
one and so on and easily ship all the corresponding source code.

As I understand this would be compatible with Parabola policies.

For shipping Mono in Guix it would most likely need to be bootstrapped
from source somehow or at least from some generated source code (like
Vala) which probably require a lot more work.

> https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/2894
This could easily be fixed in FSDG distributions if mono was built from
source.

I've no idea if there are policies against surveillance in the free
software directory though.

But requiring to patch software seem not to work for the free software
directory as for instance phoronix-test-suite was not added because it
uses a third party repository that has nonfree software in it.

In contrast FSDG distributions that ship phoronix-test-suite simply
patch it to avoid that issue.

Denis.

pgp8uijq9hWcZ.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature