New Debian experience: taking over the maintenance of an abandoned package.

Well, that was not easy. I spent 10 hours on it yesterday just to get it to build with the current upstream release.

But the satisfaction when you finally get something ready to be uploaded, and you know a package you relied on is not going to leave the repositories due to a lack of maintenance, that’s a new feeling I am happy to know.

So if you use Mono on Debian, Trixie (Debian 13) will come with an up-to-date and actively maintained package. And if you had filed a bug report against this package and it had been left rotting without an answer, I promise I’m going to do a pass over all the open bugs soon and try to fix at least the ones I have the skills for.

By the way, if your software relies on Mono and you would like it to stay easy to install on Debian, please consider chiming in and joining me in the maintenance effort. That kind of thing is much more fun when it is done as a team.

Here I wanted to keep it because it is used by ./play.it to unvendor the shipped Mono binaries/libraries from several video games:
- A Virus Named Tom
- Bastion
- Bleed
- Bleed 2
- Capsized
- Celeste
- Cryptark
- Eliza
- Escape Goat
- Escape Goat 2
- Exapunks
- Fez
- Gnomoria
- Hammerwatch
- Last Call BBS
- Melody's Escape
- Möbius Front '83
- Molek-Syntez
- Opus Magnum
- Owlboy
- Proteus
- Reus
- Rogue legacy
- SpaceChem
- Star-Twine
- Stardew Valley
- Terraria
- The Adventures of Shuggy
- The Swapper
- The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection
- Tooth and Tail
- Transistor

So joining me in the maintenance of Mono for Debian (and as a side-effect, for Ubuntu and other derivatives) is a good way to ensure you will get the best experience when playing these games (and probably more in the future) on a Debian-based distribution. No prior experience is required, I’m learning as I go and I would be happy to share that with anyone.