[Fedora-packaging] Changing default paths for mono packages

[Christian Krause]

Hi,

After discussing the topic on mono-devel and with the upstream mono
developers I would like to run the following suggestions by the FPC:


The way how mono is packaged in Fedora is uncommon with respect to
mono's default search paths. The standard mono's libdir "/usr/lib" was
changed to "%{_libdir}" (which is "/usr/lib64" on x86_64).

Since this contradicts upstream's understanding of the directory
structure it causes lots of unnecessary work for the maintainers and
quite a couple of bug reports due to uncaught uses of these default
paths within the mono packages. Nearly every mono package must be
adjusted and so the majority of all patches for mono consists solely of
%{_libdir} "fixes". Since it looks like that upstream (not only
mono-core, basically all mono-based packages) does not agree to these
changes, non of these patches are accepted upstream nor do we get any
help from upstream if the issues are caused by Fedora's directory structure.

However, solving this issue (and reverting the change to mono's default
paths) would include to loose the ability to use
32bit parts of the mono stack in x86-64 - a feature which never worked
correctly and is not available for perl or python either.

Fedora's decision to change the default paths was based on a statement
from the mono developers a couple of years ago regarding the
architecture-independence of the mono assemblies. I have discussed this
topic with upstream again, and there was an agreement that
mono assemblies are treated as platform independent and so the original
reason to change the paths is not valid anymore.

Please see all details on the following wiki:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Chkr/MonoMultiarchChanges


So my question to the FPC:

Do you agree with the suggested changes?


Best regards,
Christian