[DotGNU]pnet/mono packaging conflicts

[Rhys Weatherley]

Recently, some packaging conflicts between Portable.NET and Mono have
come to light, revolving around binaries in both packages with the
same names (especially ilasm).  This is causing problems for users
of all major GNU/Linux distributions.

Portable.NET has been using those names since early 2001, well before the Mono
project was first publicly announced (this history is well documented in
the pnet "NEWS" file).  As such, we believe that we have a two year priority
on those names in Unix-compatible environments such as GNU/Linux.

The "hard-wired compiler" argument that has been bandied about is a red
herring.  If the compiler is open source, it can be easily modified to
use an environment variable.  If the compiler is closed source, then PATH
modifications can be used to work around the compiler.

Since the Mono packagers created the problem, it is only right and proper
to expect that they fix it by renaming the Mono binaries.  Symlinks for
the traditional names can be placed in a separate directory such as
"/usr/lib/mono/bin" for use with closed source compilers.

DotGNU will not be implementing a work-around for this naming conflict
because we were not the ones who created the conflict.  If the situation
were reversed, we would rename or move our binaries and simply deal with it.
We expect the same courtesy to be shown us in return.

Cheers,

Rhys.