Is Xamarin Studio absolutely required to release Mono apps on the Mac App Store & MonoMacPackager obsolete?

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There was a time, not two years ago, when you could didn't need Xamarin.Mac to deploy Mono apps to the Mac App Store. To be clear, that's the store for Mac OS X desktop apps, not iOS apps.

Now the MonoMacPackager page says the following:

If you want to create self-contained Mac bundles or publish your software to the Mac AppStore, you should get Xamarin.Mac which is a strict superset of MonoMac.

I haven't seen a good tutorial of how to release to the Mac App Store since Xamarin.Mac came out. Is Xamarin.Mac now "required", so to speak, to release Mono apps on Mac that have UIs written in XCode/IB? Or is the "subset" which is MonoMac still enough to create these hybrid apps?

I realize I could write against GTK# or Windows.Forms and have users install Mono themselves -- or use bockbuild like Banshee still does and have things self-contained -- to create standalone apps. I'm interested instead in the ability to have Mono code interface with native UIs created in XCode and to release those apps on the Mac App Store.

I also realize there's a template for open source projects in Xamarin Studio now, which actually kind of scares me. It seems the full treatment has gone behind the Xamarin pay wall.

So, in other words, is the MonoMacPackager obsolete with respect to releasing Mono apps with native UIs that pass Mac App Store muster?

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