Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support

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Fedora has always been shipping Mono 4.8, the open source development platform for building cross-platform applications, with each Fedora release. Even after shipping Mono 5.0 in May 2017, the company still continued with Mono 4.8. But it seems the idea will be changing now with the release of Fedora 31. With Fedora 31, the team at Fedora is finally planning to switch to Mono 5.20 which is expected to release later this year.

An effort was made in the past few months by the Fedora team to build Mono from source. The build was also done for Debian using msc instead of csc and the reference assemblies were rebuilt from source. In case of Mono, it requires itself to build. The Mono version 4.8 which is included in Fedora currently, is too old to build version 5.20.

Currently, the team has been using monolite and a little version of mono compiler, .NET 4.7.1 reference assemblies for first build time. The sources for the required patch files are maintained on Github.

The transition from Mono 4 to Mono 5 was on halt because of the changes required in their compiler stack and its dependency upon some binary references. These binaries are available as a source but treated as pre-compiled binaries for simplification and speed.

The Fedora developers are now working towards getting Mono 5 into Fedora 31. This will also let the cross-platform applications that are relying upon Microsoft’s .NET framework 4.7 and later to now work. Mono 4.8 is also not compatible for PowerPC 64-bit but it is expected that Mono 5 will be.

To know more about this news, check out the change proposal.