Building MonoDevelop from SVN

Yesterday I managed to build MonoDevelop from SVN source. I had done it before but had forgotten how to do it, and there are no fool-proof instructions on what you need to build.

I compiled mono from SVN and installed in parallel to Ubuntu’s 1.9.1 version, following the instructions from http://www.mono-project.com/Parallel_Mono_Environments and http://www.mono-project.com/Compiling_Mono_From_SVN.

MonoDevelop has some dependencies that I also had to build: debugger, mono-addins, gtk-sharp, gtksourceview-sharp.

To build everything I did the following steps:

Mono debugger

cd ~/mono-svn
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/debugger
cd debugger
./autogen.sh --prefix=$MONO_PREFIX
make
sudo make install

Mono addins

cd ~/mono-svn
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/mono-addins
cd mono-addins
./autogen.sh --prefix=$MONO_PREFIX
make
sudo make install

GTK#

cd ~/mono-svn
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/gtk-sharp
cd gtk-sharp
./bootstrap-2.14 --prefix=$MONO_PREFIX
make
sudo make install

gtksourceview-sharp

cd ~/mono-svn
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/branches/gtksourceview-sharp-0.x
cd gtksourceview-sharp-0.x
./autogen.sh --prefix=$MONO_PREFIX
make
sudo make install

Monodevelop

cd ~/mono-svn
svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/monodevelop
cd monodevelop
./configure --prefix=$MONO_PREFIX
make
sudo make install

This puts monodevelop in $MONO_PREFIX/bin/monodevelop
where I can run it. However, when I start MonoDevelop I get a message box saying that an add-in with an empty path could not be started (and in the details: Could not load type ‘MonoDevelop.Platform.GnomePlatform’ from assembly ‘GnomePlatform’…). I haven’t figured out why I get this error, but if I click Yes to continue everything seems to work.

The first time configure is run in the monodevelop directory, it gives the option to select the desired plugins. Subsequent runs of configure simply re-use that choice. To pick different plugins you can run

./configure --prefix=$MONO_PREFIX --select