This page is likely outdated (last edited on 11 Sep 2010). Visit the new documentation for updated content.

InfrastructureProjects

These are some infrastructure projects that we should look at implementing

Table of contents

Status Pages

We currently track the status of Mono vs various APIs in the class status page, we should augment this to cover:

  • Olive class libraries (they are generated, but are still inside Novell’s firewall. We be posted publicly soon)
  • Silverlight APIs (not ready to do yet).

Packaging and Q&A

We should package libraries, components and applications so we can more easily QA the Mono runtime, verify that there are no regressions, reduce the duplicated effort in the team to test software, provide software in an easy way for people to demo and try out and to function as a reference of how applications are ported from Windows to Linux using Mono.

We should use the openSUSE build system, as this would allow us to support multiple platforms in the future as well. (We may want to establish a packaging naming standard, similar to how the perl/python/etc as well as debian cil packages are named).

Starting with one or two platforms for now is fine, we do not need to build on every platform, I rather have us jump-start the effort and get a lot of software only on openSUSE and later add more platforms (SLED, RHEL, etc).

In addition to the Gtk#-based applications that we have (and I believe we package most of this), I can think of the following classes of applications that we should package:

Windows and MacOS packaging

We need to sort out the distribution for Windows.

Distribution of Gtk+ and Gtk# for MacOS X.

Plans on how to split the MacOS installer into Runtime and SDK

Ongoing Maintenance of third party components

We currently ship a few packages, and we should make the re-packaging a standard part of our process, subscribing to the various groups that we need to:

Our own Technologies:

  • We need to ship the HeapShot profiler.

WinForms Apps:

Libraries:

Web Libraries:

Applications:

Web Applications:

  • done: ASP.NET starter kits
  • Google Data Libraries.
  • done: mojoPortal
  • BlogEngine.NET a blog engine that supports Mono out of the box.

Desktop Applications:

Compilers:

  • Boo (wade packages this already)
  • IronPython Community Edition (wade packages this already)

Extensions:

Tools:

Some other suggestions that some people mentioned:

  • NCover
  • NProf
  • log4net
  • NHibernate
  • Phalanger
  • CruiseControl.NET

In addition to plainly shipping these, we should add pkg-config files where we need to, and fix the build and installation processes where we have to. Ideally we should send those fixes upstream.

Open to discussion: should we upgrade our NUnit?

Including in the Mono Group other Packages

We now have a collection of ASP.NET applications packaged, we should get these on the openSUSE build system. Contact Marek for the source rpms.

Mono Group on openSUSE system

We will need to add other folks from the team (Marek, Miguel) to the group, so we can add new packages here.

Windows-Forms sample applications

We currently have done some ports of some apps that we found a long time ago in the CodeProject, these live in the

svn+ssh://YOURLOGIN@mono-cvs.ximian.com/extras/trunk/wf-apps

module. We typically kept track of the “original” and the modified version. We can use this to create a diff, the only trick here will be to track the original zip or tarfile.

Binary applications

There are some packages like Reflector and a handful of games that only come as binaries. Reflector is kind of useless as it insists on getting updates every once in a while, and the updating feature does not work on Linux.

Desktop Applications Considerations

Both the wf-apps and the binary-only winforms apps work, but are not available in an easy-to-use way for the majority of users.

We should:

  • Deploy these following our Application Deployment Guidelines: $prefix/lib/APP/ contains exe and dlls, $prefix/bin/APP is a shell script that calls Mono with the app from $prefix/lib/APP/APP.exe
  • Distribute .desktop files, so the app shows in the proper menus.
  • Some apps that we have hang (or used to hang, we should make sure that we do not distribute those, or that we fix the bugs in them).

ASP.NET based applications

Marek has now packaged a handful of ASP.NET applications, talk to Marek about getting these on openSUSE Build system.

There are packages for web applications like MediaWiki, we could do this for the various ASP.NET opensource applications out there, and even for the various starter kits on http://www.asp.net (those that have a suitable license)

We should look into policies in terms of activating the app after installation (is it activated or not?), but in addition, lets:

  • Ensure that we ship with AppArmor profiles, so the applications run and are secure even in the presence of application holes.

Third-Party Components and Libraries

Up until now we have limited our packaging efforts of third party stuff to things that we absolutely need, but we have not really packaged third party libraries or components that would benefit Mono users.

The /Software and /Libraries page contain a lot of interesting stuff that we should probably test, package and distribute.

For example, the Google Data libraries are over there, the Tao libraries, ZeroC’s ICE, etc.

Increase our porting efforts

Once we are done with the packaging of the stuff that we have, we should revisit what is new on the CodeProject, on Google and other sites and see what is worth adding to our QA queue.

Provide an Available Mono Software Catalog

The build service does not provide any user friendly way to browse packages, you have to know what you are looking for and use the search functionality. We need a catalog page that links to each package’s 1-Click Install page. Also, make sure the link is to an OBS page that does not require a OBS account. This doesn’t have to be fancy, just a list of links on a wiki page would be a great start.

Some extra libraries to package:

  • Tao libraries.
  • Google Data Libraries.

Hosting Services

Maintainer: Thomas Wiest.

Our new machines outside of the firewall will be the host to the following services, each on a separated host:

  • Source code
  • Bugzilla (Completed)
  • ASP.NET Application Server
  • Windows Host that runs our test suite against MS .Net
  • Buildbot host

Main Source Code Instance

One instance will only host the source files and packages, and will only offer those through http or ftp, the idea here is to mitigate risks in case of a break-in. We should run AppArmor on this instance to further limit what could be done in case of a break-in.

Secondary Source Code Instance

This should be a separate host to offer source code that third-party projects want to upload and release. We would give contributors a way of uploading and maintaining their packages on this system.

Windows Host that runs our test suite against MS .Net

This should run our test suites against MS .Net 1.1 and 2.0 and report to the monobuild web page the results.

Bugzilla Host

We have migrated our existing http://bugzilla.ximian.com installation to http://bugzilla.novell.com.

ASP.NET Application Server

Here we will be able to run our ASP.NET applications, like the ones that Marek wants to write to organize our software collections and maybe run some instances of popular ASP.NET software.

Buildbot Host

This will be the instance where we run Wade’s continuous build system.

As for the disk space on each instance, I do not think that we need much space on the ASP.NET instance for now, and Bugzilla we can probably measure as you attempt the migration.

Documentation

Maintainer: none right now.

Tasks

There are various documentation related projects that we need to do:

  • Incorporate the new API updates from the ECMA 335 specification into our old import, so we can get all the docs for all the new generics and reflection APIs introduced.
  • Ensure that Monodoc renders all new APIs with the “Available since 2.0” labels where this matters.
  • Run Monodoc’s update feature for the 2.0 profiles that are completed (System.XML, ASP.NET).
  • Generate Monodoc stubs for Windows.Forms 1.1 and 2.0

Ongoing Maintenance

When the hosts move, move the /docs server to the ASP.NET server, and start the process of maintaining docs from RPMs instead of having documents manually uploaded in an as-needed/as-remembered basis.