Is Debian Really Afraid of Mono? No!

Not only is Roy Schestowitz a little on the paranoid side,he apparently likes to troll, as well. In a recent article he claims that

The necessary harmonisation between GNOME metapackages and tasksel turned out to be in favour of removing tomboy from metapackages instead of adding it to tasksel, because Mono is widely seen as “controversial” (see above).

and quotes the developers:

 * tomboy: very nice app, but controversial since it brings the
full Mono stack, so we don’t make it part of
gnome-desktop-environment.

The only problem is that, if you actually read the link, you find that he's taken everything out of context. I couldn't let that go, so I posted the following response

I know you like to live in your own reality, but the thread explains itself nicely if you read it.

Josselin Mouette is the package maintainer for gnome-desktop-environment, which he/she describes in the message as ‘Currently, the “gnome-desktop” task consists of the “gnome-desktop-environment” metapackage (official GNOME release) plus a number of extras. However we already provide the “gnome” metapackage which consists of g-d-e plus a number of extras to make a full-fledged desktop. ‘ He/she suggests INCLUDING Tomboy, but says the quote you use in your summary to show a possible downside.

Joey Hess (who apparently has privilege to immediately edit the gnome-desktop task) gives the REAL reason for not including Tomboy when he responds “There’s a fundamental difference between the gnome package and the gnome-desktop task. The former is the complere (sic) gnome desktop environment with all extras, as shipped by gnome, while the latter attempts to be the best gnome-based desktop that Debian can put together and ship on a CD/DVD.” Later, “I doubt that the size of [Tomboy’s] dep chain (~50 mb) makes it worthwhile to add it to our task.”
Josselin answers “Yeah, that’s what I feared. I hope someone rewrites it in Vala some day…” He/she understands that there’s not enough space.

Tomboy (and by proxy, Mono) were reduced to “a recommends,” meaning that tasksel won’t install Tomboy, but aptitude (the recommended method to add software) WILL.

Mono is just too big a dependency to put on CD1 for one application.

If you install a Debian standard system, then “aptitude install gnome,” you’ll STILL get Tomboy.

There is no controversy. Quit stirring up stuff that’s not there.

Considering the quality of the hysteria on that site, I doubt he'll listen.