Hoary Mono Install Broken?

[Matt Philmon]

> I might be missing the obvious, but when I try to install Mono from
> hoary, I get the following output.
> 
> The following packages have unmet dependencies:
> mono: Depends: mono-jit (= 1.0.4-1) but it is not going to be installed or
>                  mono-mint (= 1.0.4-1) but it is not going to be installed
>           Depends: mono-utils (= 1.0.4-1) but it is not going to be installed
>           Depends: mono-assemblies-arch but it is not going to be installed
> E: Broken packages

It is indeed broken. The reason is that some of the newer packages are missing. Either there is a bug in them or they are still being worked on. You need, among other things, mono-assemblies-base in order to install mono-jit which is a major dependency. I've been working through this for days as I'm still getting the hang of this building thing.

However, if you really need Mono right now you have a couple options:
1) Wait for the new packages to all be released to the archive. After all 1.0.5 is out now anyway.
2) Modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to point (temporarily) back to Warty for Universe and reinstall Mono 1.0.1 which is still there. This worked for me until I got testy about wanting to try out the latest version. It won't let you install some of the newer builds of some apps... like Blam, but the older builds of many of these (again, like Blam) will still build/install just fine. Once installed you can reset your /etc/apt/sources.list to point back to Hoary but you'll have to start being more selective about what you allow to update. It will try to update some of your mono packages which will ultimately result in Mono being removed because some of the lower dependencies do not yet exist. This is likely what happened to you.
3) Build Mono from source. I gotta tell you, this was a major, major, major headache for me. I HIGHLY recommend that if you can and this isn't a mission critical box you go with the development release 1.1.3 rather than the latest official 1.0.5 (except where necessary) as the build/installation process is FAR simpler. If details are needed contact me. I've run across a few good pointers, had to overcome some major breaking points here and there, and generally have a nearly complete guide to getting it done. I'm still missing gtksourceview-sharp which is a dependency to getting MonoDevelop rebuilt but I think that's the last hurdle for me. I already have Blam 1.60 running now on top of Mono 1.1.3.

Matt