Instructions in contribution doc are out of date
The Phonix uses the usual suite of Linux and GNU dev utils, which are standard on almost any distribution of Linux or POSIX these days. Aside from those, you need the following:
- A Java Runtime v. 1.5 or greater
- The Mono .NET runtime and build tools, including gmcs
- The NUnit framework for running unit tests
If you're running some variant of debian, then you should install all of the following:
debhelper (>= 7.0.50~) mono-devel (>= 2.10.0) default-jre nunit-console (= 2.6) texinfo
The versions of these that currently get installed (on Ubuntu 16.04 at least) are unable to successfully build phonix. The two incompatibilities appear to be Java 1.8 (there's a bug in the version of antlr you're using that throws a NPE in 1.8) and Mono 4+, in which gmcs no longer exists. I was able to successfully build after finding a repo for java 1.7 and changing GMCS in the Makefile to point to `mcs`.