Maybe. As you can see from its history, it was mostly an individual effort (for which I am very thankful).
Maybe it was said that way to cover the inevitable how-can-I-get-it than the you-must-do-just-this idea.
Without usage reporter data, how do we know outliers? Survey of forum posters is probably skewed.
What’s known is that latest LTS of very popular distro fails by default (I guess) due to its mono 4.6.2. Whatever mono gets chosen, can our OS installers at least be updated before beta for new installs? Existing users just take their chances on updates, and I hope there’s lots of help handling any fallout.
Announcements category could be used to get a heads-up to those registered. Any better channels?
My July 26 attempt to survey the forum got an idea of what’s been mentioned, but not what’s now run:
Forum Google search survey, mostly taken 07/26/2019
17 "RedHat"
2 "Red Hat"
6 "RHEL"
1 "RHEL 6"
0 "Enterprise Linux 6"
0 "RHEL 7"
0 "Enterprise Linux 7"
48 "CentOS"
5 "CentOS 6"
27 "CentOS 7"
39 "Fedora"
1 "SUSE"
16 "openSUSE"
0 "SLES"
0 "Enterprise Server"
70 "Arch" (rolling release)
82 "Manjaro" (rolling release)
219 "Synology"
109 "Synology" "mono"
118 "QNAP"
25 "QNAP" "mono"
4 "Slackware"
97 "Unraid"
22 "Unraid" "mono"
237 "Debian"
23 "Debian 8"
37 "Debian" "Jessie"
39 "Debian 9"
33 "Debian" "Stretch"
350 "Ubuntu"
99 "Ubuntu 16.04"
5 "Ubuntu" "Xenial"
56 "Ubuntu 18.04"
5 "Ubuntu" "Bionic"
34 "Ubuntu" "LTS"
111 "Linux Mint"
5 "Linux Mint 18"
3 "Linux Mint" (Sarah OR Serena OR Sonya OR Sylvia)
7 "Linux Mint 19"
9 "Linux Mint" (Tara OR Tessa OR Tina)
0 "LMDE"
1 "Gentoo"
0 "Mageia"
228 "macOS"
121 "OSX"
Versions for mono was your good site to see what distro ships what, and mono-project seems to support:
Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 (high usage, so it’s covered well if user downloads either before or after blowup). Ubuntu 14.04 reached end of standard support this past April, so that gets it off my worries about support.
Debian 9 and 10
Debian “stretch” Release Information
Debian 9.9 was released April 27th, 2019. Debian 9.0 was initially released on June 17th, 2017.
Debian “buster” Release Information
Debian 10.0 was released July 6th, 2019.
CentOS/RHEL 6,7,8 (taking things way back, although note I’m not yet looking up mono versions).
Fedora has 29 and 28
In distros of interest that mono-project.com doesn’t support (if we’re willing to relax documentation note), Slackware/Unraid has mono 5.0.1.1, and Synology has at least v5.18.0.240-12, so 5.0 looks a little better.
Mono 5.0.0 Release Notes also is where compilers (and much else) changed, so C# 7 is better handled:
Release date: 10 May 2017
I keep hoping that this forces move to at least mono 4.8, but the distro security teams aren’t biting AFAIK. No new developer commenters seem to be joining in here, so I’ll yield, but expect help on supporting this. Canary will let us fine-tune the response systems some before this goes to beta and affects more users.
as part of a large bundle, rather than small slide-in which would need less testing, so how to get to beta?
FYI I just opened “Google Drive (full access) login” restricted in early 2020 #3875 for possible milestones. Should we add this to Upcoming beta or hope we can push another out before early 2020 brings a crisis?
EDIT:
mono 5.0 is also a nice even number, which is not just an aesthetic thing. .NET Portability Analyzer has:
which maybe will help figure out some API holes, or maybe the tool doesn’t know, and code throws later:
The reference assemblies were updated to fully match the .NET 4.6.2 API set. This means that you no longer get compilation errors about missing classes/methods when building against one of the .NET profiles via
msbuild/xbuild.Note that at runtime certain APIs that Mono doesn’t (yet) implement will still throw an exception.
however we’re probably helped by having few-to-no exactly 5.0.0 mono installs around. Most 5.x are later.