The Tomboy Quest

• Tomboy.exe is truly a PE32 executable holding .Net assembly ... my bare kernel doesn't want to run that
• what with mono-runtime ? it starts, but is missing Mono.Posix ...
• it is in my /ubuntu/usr/lib/mono/4.5, as a dll, but there are also some .../lib/mono/gac/Mono.Posix and a /usr/lib/libMonoPosixHelper.so ... so I'd better install libmono-posix4.0-cil from debian repos ...
• okay, but now it complains about a missing gtk-shark ... I see references for that in /ubuntu/usr/share/cli-common/packages.d ... let's try and make some symlink ...
• still not ... time to install strace and see what it fails to find... mhmm ... seems to be the Facades/gtk-sharp.dll and friends. But ubuntu did not have any Facades either ... so I guess that must be the files in .../lib/mono/gac/*-sharp instead. (strace did look for them, at least). Without gac contents, none of packages.d or policies.d is taken into account ...
• trying again ... more sophisticated exception this time, about libglibsharpglue-2.so not found, if I'm not mistaken. It insist on it to be in /usr/lib/cli (fair enough), which only contains binfmt-detector-cli so far (part of mono-runtime)
• more progress again, now missing libappindicator.so.1 ? would debian pacakge libayatana-appindicator1 do the trick ?
• 
  libgconf-2.so.4 you say ? okay, there's a .deb too ... now it says "Initializing Mono.Addins" ... it say "no GUI 'su' tool found" ... nothing ... What if I have mate-session running ? Ah! There you are ! Okay, your icon in the tray is a broken file ... your icon in the enlightenment dock is a question mark, but you ... are ... there. (I guess using --new-note or --search on the command line would have done the trick as well).
  

Time for some context, I guess ? Well, you know I've been installing a debian lately. It turns out it did not have the tomboy tool available in the repository... This is no surprise to me: the latest ubuntu I installed at work did not have it either, but my colleagues had started to deploy phabricator and it's been a good amount of years that I've switched all my dev-musing into that (mostly because it has instant upload of pictures despite a more sluggish overall interface ... and I can easily share contents with colleagues).

I'm done with PhD research and all, so my old collection of notes about a better Internet aren't very useful either ... but I started using tomboy a few years before it turned obsolete to hold some of my fairy's collection and automate the production of monthly curated list of that collection. So the last weeks have been a reboot-dance between the new debbie and the old ubuntu depending on whether I needed USB support or she needed her collection. That must come to an end because firefox certificates are about to expire in that old ubuntu, with no more packages to replace it.

The process above will sure turn into a maintenance nightmare sooner or later, but guess what, it's not the first time I resort on such process. Last time was to keep using an old Adobe Acrobat for Linux because the new one was a usability nightmare ... and it did a fair job for years and years, even hopping from SuSE to Ubuntu. Sure, I tried alternatives, like Folio, or rebuilding from sources, or the tomboy-ng package readily available for my debian (but that turned out to have several critical bugs and lacked key features for my curation technique, despite having a very welcome convert-old-notes tool) ... I hadn't tried NobleNote, thought ... maybe I should have ...