Heya,
For those who haven’t been following closely, the explanation behind Jo Shields’ recent post instructing us on the greatness of Mono and the Microsoft .NET approach to software development could be found in the fact that Josselin Mouette has decided that Mono must be part of the default desktop install for Debian Squeeze.
The reason for that is so Tomboy, the note-taking application, can be included now. Well I’m not really sure a note-taking application really needs to be in the default selection, to the point that it justifies dragging ~40 MiB of dependencies into the first CD. However, being the maintainer for Gnote in Debian, there’s one thing I know. I’ll explain with two screenshots:
Well, so which is which again? This is really just the surface. If you try both programs you’ll see that they behave so similarly, to the point that most users couldn’t tell the difference (unless they depend on some of the few less noticeable features of Tomboy that haven’t been ported yet).
I guess somehow I could be persuaded that note-taking is so important it must be in our default package selection, but what is the reason we want to drag all the .NET stack in to get the same functionality? So far I haven’t heard any, I only hear some bragging about this development environment being so “amazingly productive” and then some rant about those detractors being a bunch “trolls” and “back-seat drivers”.
I have to admit, however, that I admire Jo’s sincerity when he makes this point: it’s not the users who want it, it’s the developers. It can’t be denied that .NET was indeed instrumental in the development of Gnote. Perhaps the real usefulness of .NET is in writing new code which can later be ported to C++ in order to run faster, consume less memory and support more architectures. One can only thank them for that.
Correction:50 MiB is the measure in Lenny. With current sid, Tomboy drags in ~40 MiB, not ~50 MiB. Thanks to Jo for letting me^H^H others know.
