Monobuild updates

During the latter part of this week I revamped monobuild to use the .spec files from SuSE's buildservice rather than using Ximian buildbuddy. This was a long overdue move. When our build machine's 700 GB disk crashed, I decided to dive in. There are some nice advantages to this:

• I'm not using the obsolete buildbuddy


• I maintain only .spec files now instead of merging changes back and forth in buildbuddy


• Those spec files can be shared with monobuild, suse build service, and suse autobuild


• When setting up a new distro chroot, I don't have to rebuild buildbuddy with the new distro info

These spec files have been in the making since I started adding mono to the buildservice several months ago. Another thing that made this move possible: I purged the unsupported distros. Their vendors don't support them, so neither should we.

It is interesting to note that there has been some talk of coming up with a cross linux distro xml description to be used in the buildservice. Kinda funny, since buildbuddy had the ability to build rpm and deb. Oh well...

One of the other monobuild features I finished up is the ability to build rpms on your local machine. Previously you could only build on a machine connected through ssh. It's not real user friendly to get this working, but it's possible. I mainly wanted to implement this to work toward to goal of enabling others to easily create the installers.

The easiest way to build local rpms is definitely with the suse buildservice. It rocks. In fact, it has replaced much of the functionality of monobuild. But, since the build service doesn't support all the platforms or distros that we build on, we'll continue to use monobuild for releases of those missing platforms. Monobuild also works great for continuously building from trunk. (There's no reason monobuild could use the buildservice tools to locally build out of trunk, but there hasn't been a need at this point.)