--- On Sat, 7/7/12, Dave Curylo <curylod@asme.org> wrote:

Many other software packages offer alternative repositories for using newer builds on RHEL and CentOS - RabbitMQ and MongoDB, for example - so my hope is that there would be a similar repository for mono.  I can understand that if other packages on the same system depend on mono, they would be affected, but my software is running alone within a virtual appliance so I have complete control over the software being installed.  Thank you for pointing out the fc18 repository and if you've had luck with that, I will give that a go.
 
OTOH, if you do start to ship mono 2.10.8, or godforbid mono 2.11.2 for RHEL, you will have to provide the whole mono-dependent stack, which is not a small undertaking. Be warned...   


It seems that the whole mono dependent stack already ships in the standard RHEL repos, as I can build mono 2.10.8 using this script, which pulls all it's dependencies from the standard repositories:


My software builds, runs, and tests as expected, so I believe 2.10.8 to work on CentOS 6, but I'd prefer not to require mono be built from source in order to deploy my software package.  As such, I'm on the hunt for a repo, or, if I have to create my own, I want to follow the process to make it available for others as more users of the repo will improve the quality.

Thank you both for your guidance.

I am aware of that script - but you will find that "yum check", for example, will not be happy, especially on a fully loaded RHEL system. Given that RHEL seems to still be with mono 2.4.x, while fc18 has mono 2.10.8, and 2.11.2 is being tested and 2.12.0 is soon to be out from upstream. 

So what you are offering, can't quite apply generally to the usual RHEL systems.

This has the problem that if you go that way, some RHEL packages will have problem upgrading through the official channels afterwards. I have been there before, though the difference between the fedora core releases is much less compared to the difference between RHEL and fc18/rawhide.