Debian – Why is mono-complete completely outdated on all versions of Debian

debianmono

The current stable Debian 7/Wheezy is running on my server.
With apt-get the latest mono version I can get is 2.10 which is three years old.
I looked up the mono-complete package and even on unstable Debian 9/Sid all you get is version 3.2.8, when the latest stable version is 3.6 and 3.8.1 is available.

I have two questions:

  1. Is there a way to get an at least somewhat recent version of mono with apt-get? Following a guide to install the latest mono was rather uncomfortable to me and I dread the next time I want to do an update.

  2. Why are only those horribly outdated packages available (even on
    unstable, future versions of Debian), when there are new, stable
    versions that are years ahead?

Best Answer

As of February 2015, the mono project supports their own Apt repositories that provide the latest bleeding edge packages and dependencies. Follow these steps:

  1. Add the Mono Project GPG signing key
  2. Add the package repository
  3. Update your package cache
  4. Install mono-devel or mono-complete

Run the following commands as root:

apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main" |    sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list
apt-get update
apt-get install mono-complete

Look at this page for further technical details: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/getting-started/install/linux/

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