Confusing Mono versions

Question

I'd like to get the latest Mono 2.x version.

• According to the official Mono release history page it is 2.10.9
• According to what appears to be the official archive it is 2.11.4
• However the latest modification date in the archive above for a 2.X release actually belongs to 2.10.12

There is no mentioned of the latter two versions in Mono's website (according to Google at least).

Any ideas what's going on? I found this blog post that suggests 2.11.4 may be an Alpha release (see the comments). Perhaps the same is true for 2.10.12, and the latest stable version was indeed 2.10.9?

A similar questions arises for the latest version of MonoDevelop supporting Mono 2.X. According to a Xamarin rep in their mailing list it is 2.8.6.5, but the GitHub release history shows 2.9.6, and the following link works: http://download.xamarin.com/monodevelop/Mac/MonoDevelop-2.9.5.dmg.

Is it again a case of an Alpha / Beta release ?

Answer 1

Mono 2.10.12 is the latest stable 2.x release (although 2.10.10, 2.10.11, and 2.10.12 were really just MacOS-specific releases, iirc).

Mono 2.11.x releases were previews for Mono 3.0.

The latest stable 2.x release of MonoDevelop was 2.8.6.5.

MonoDevelop 2.9.x releases were previews for 3.0.

At the time, we used the same version scheme as the Linux kernel for both Mono and MonoDevelop, where an even minor version meant stable and an odd minor version meant development/unstable/preview/alpha/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

I think Mono still uses the same version scheme, but MonoDevelop no longer does (starting with 5.0). For example, MonoDevelop 5.1 is stable even though the minor version number is odd.