Fedora 31 Aims To Finally Offer Mono 5 For Open-Source .NET Support

While Fedora is generally known to ship the very latest upstream software with each release, Fedora has continued shipping Mono 4.8 even though Mono 5.0 shipped in May 2017. With the Fedora 31 release due out later in the year, they are finally working on switching to Mono 5.

The transition from Mono 4 to Mono 5 had been held up because of changes in their compiler stack and it depending upon some binary references. The Mono build process depends upon some binaries, which are actually available as source, but treated as pre-compiled binaries for simplification and speed.

This change caused issue for Debian and the Fedora developers are also in the same boat due to being adverse to binary components in their build process. Mono also requires itself to build and using Mono 4.8 isn't able to build Mono 5.

The Fedora developers feel they have a path forward now as outlined via this change proposal and will be working to get Mono 5 into Fedora 31. This upgrade will allow cross-platform applications relying upon Microsoft's .NET to now work if they have required .NET Framework 4.7 or later. Mono 4.8 also hasn't worked on PowerPC 64-bit but Mono 5 should, among other benefits to upgrading this open-source .NET stack.