In general, we try not to maintain a bunch of different versions of things unless a package has an unstable interface and other packages depend on non-latest versions. I noticed you've submitted other versions in PRs, so I'm just wondering whether mono is unfriendly and external projects are all pinned to different versions of it. My inclination would be (based on standard semantic versioning) to have one derivation per major version number (so one for 5.x, one for 4.x, etc.), but if you tell me I'm wrong I'm not fundamentally opposed to keeping lots of versions of things around.

@copumpkin I believe that it is reasonable to have different versions of mono. It is like having different versions of jdk. Developers that develop legitimately might need to target different versions of mono. Thus it would be fare in my mind to support most widely used versions of it in Nix. I consider most widely used currently: 4.6.2 and 4.8. Version 5.x is pretty unstable as far as I know and I guess will get upgrades instead of new packages. Following that same logic I might have chosen to upgrade existing mono46 to something like mono462 - that is true. The reason for my decision was that I wanted to avoid rebuilding other dependencies that already exist.

So, the bottom line, I think it would be a good strategy going forward for mono packages to support multiple "primary" versions that folks typically target.

Okay, you know best! So perhaps adopt a strategy of one attribute per minor version in widespread use? So mono44, mono46, mono48, and a mono5?

I don't really get adding a separate derivation to avoid rebuilding dependencies. That's why we update packages 😄 So it seems weird to me, even if we decide to keep several versions, to keep around a 4.6.0 and a 4.6.2.

@copumpkin makes sense. Will fix in the next couple of days.

@copumpkin I have upgraded mono46 from pointing to 4.6.0.xxx to pointing to 4.6.2.xxx. So, now it is one attribute per minor version.

@kuznero merge conflicts can you rebase?

Ugh, I forgot about this one. If @kuznero won't return to this in several days I can help rebasing.

@abbradar, @disassembler, unfortunately I managed to accidentally remove my branch with mono50 and some other ones with active PRs. I will spend some time today, tomorrow re-creating branches and re-submitting PRs. Sorry for inconvenience! Will post an update when done.