Tue, 30 Jun 2009
Dear Richard,
in answer to your open letter Why free software
shouldn't depend on Mono or C#
I like to explain a small
misunderstanding that seems to have been spread pretty wide recently.
Debian has not to include Mono in the default installation, for the
sake of Tomboy
. The default installation – or to be more
precise: The default GNOME installation (there are installation media which
install an KDE, Xfce or LXDE desktop by default, too) – hasn't
changed. It still installs a more or less minimal Gnome Desktop without
tomboy and without mono. As far as I know there haven't been major changes
in package selection for the GNOME installation media, nor are there major
changes planed.
What really has changed is that one of our meta packages, which are mainly used to install a set of packages. Indeed our meta package to install everything gnome related got a dependency on Tomboy and will indeed pull in mono, too.
That doesn't have any effect on the default installation
(which
doesn't use that package) nor does it effect a major part of Debian's GNOME
users, who prefer to install gnome-desktop
(a meta package to pull in a simple GNOME Desktop) or even the gnome-core
meta-package (which installs the bare necessities to run GNOME
applications). Please see the numbers at our popularity
contest system for yourself.
So, Debian didn't change the default installation
(whatever
that's supposed to be) but the dependency of a package which is used by a
minority of our users who explicitly wishes to install everything GNOME
related (which is to the best of my knowledge in accordance with upstream
developers who added tomboy to the default GNOME installation, too).
Yours truly,
Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
Debian Developer and Spokesperson
Update: Due to some missunderstandings, I wrote a more verbose post about the whole situation.
postet at 15:45 into [Debian] permanent link