Mono Adds Mac OS X Package

Good news for those of you who've went through the pain of trying to get Mono installed on Mac OS X: the team has quietly added a Mac OS X package. If you previously installed to /usr/local, however, be aware that the packaged version installs to /opt/local and adjust any paths accordingly. The Beta-1 Windows installer has also been fixed; download it here.

Re:Aha!

[Alrescha]

"Godamnit, I'd just started to get over those fink morons and their /sw tree, now we gotta put up with an /opt."

Where do you think it should go?

It is a long-standing philisophy in some software development circles that you never install your software into system directories (/bin, /usr). If you're adding something yourself it goes into /usr/local. /opt was used for other software providers stuff.

I think /opt and /sw are much better than installing into system-provided directories (which is an insane practice).

A.

Re:Is .Net on OS X a Good Thing?

[bay43270]

I am sure that others have expressed this view before, but is this necessarily going to be A Good Thing? Isn't this going to lead to developers less likely to have special OS X ports that take advantage of specific OS X features?

I think this is a great thing for OSX. OSX support will lead to full featured mono cocoa bindings. This will allow mono and .net developers to port the core logic of thier applications to the mac and still take advantage of OSX facilities for the UI and IO.

Sure, there will always be the lazy programmers who just use mono's winforms implementation to move a windows app to the mac (like all those ugly X11 apps being moved to the mac today). In .net, those winforms implementations can be treated as a stop-gap until a new UI can be written for the app in cocoa#.

I think mono is going to draw out a lot of windows programmers who always wanted to write for the mac or linux, but never wanted to learn the languages (Objective-C or C). Now they can keep working in C#, VB, or whatever. They just pickup a new API (cocoa# or gtk#) and start coding 'native' mac or linux apps.

Re:Is .Net on OS X a Good Thing?

[JimRay]

I've wondered this myself, especially given the "embrace and extend" mentality of Microsoft's past, but ultimatley I'm convinced that Mono on OS X is a good thing for the same reason Perl or Apache on OS X is a good thing. Like it or not, .Net seems not to suck. Like it or not, there seems to be a burgeoning open source community embracing .Net.

For instance, I'm an Actionscript developer. A project I've taken great interest in is ASDocGen [asdocgen.org], which aims to bring JavaDoc-like functionality to Actionscript. This project is written in C# with the express purpose of being multi-platform via Mono.

In the end, it makes OS X a richer platform to develop on. Rather than be limited to a few tools to do my job as a web developer, I have a vast array of options, from open source web servers to GUI text editors [barebones.com] to Photoshop -- I can even open Word docs that clients send me without a problem. Having another tool in my aresenal only makes me a better developer.

Apple has a very strong, committed developer base. They will continue to push great products for OS X. The ability to run some .Net apps will only make OS X better.

seems superfluous...

[javax]

superb. Mono is available via DarwinPorts [opendarwin.org] for a rather long time already.
Why should we need this so urgently? There is no package for Debian or FreeBSD either... no one with a brain would think about making packages for those!