Publishing a native AOT library shouldn't publish managed symbols files of ProjectReferences

[eerhardt]

Describe the bug

When publishing a native AOT library that has a ProjectReference to another class library, the other class library's managed .pdb symbols are being published along size the native AOT library. These are unnecessary files and should be excluded by default.

To Reproduce

Given 2 projects:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <InvariantGlobalization>true</InvariantGlobalization>
    <PublishAot>true</PublishAot>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="..\AnotherClassLib\AnotherClassLib.csproj" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

using AnotherClassLib;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace MyLibrary;

public static class EntryPoints
{
    [UnmanagedCallersOnly(EntryPoint = "MyValidate")]
    public static int MyValidate()
    {
        Class1 c = new();
        c.Method();
        return 1;
    }
}

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
  </PropertyGroup>

</Project>

namespace AnotherClassLib;

public class Class1
{
    public void Method()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello from a method");
    }
}

dotnet publish -r win-x64 the first project and inspect the publish folder.

The AnotherClassLib.pdb file shouldn't be there. It is unnecessary.

Exceptions (if any)

N/A

cc @agocke @MichalStrehovsky @sbomer

[MichalStrehovsky]

The AnotherClassLib.xml is there because SDK says that we publish those XMLs by default. It's not specific to building native AOT libraries, it's for any kind of publish.

You can opt out with PublishDocumentationFiles=false. I don't understand why we need to publish these in general. You might have more context as you signed off on it in #1062. It might be better to separate this part of the problem into a separate issue so that it can be evaluated under multiple angles (any implications on PublishTrimmed or PublishSingleFile?).

The PDB of the reference ends up in the output because we don't exclude it in ILCompiler targets. I think we should really do the proper fix discussed at dotnet/runtime#98342 to fix this. We don't have an issue tracking that. This can be the issue.

[eerhardt]

The AnotherClassLib.xml is there because SDK says that we publish those XMLs by default. It's not specific to building native AOT libraries, it's for any kind of publish.

Good call. I forgot that we did that. I believe its main reason was for things like swagger / OpenAPI runtime document generation. But I agree that in general non-ASP.NET apps shouldn't need this behavior.

The PDB of the reference ends up in the output because we don't exclude it in ILCompiler targets. I think we should really do the proper fix discussed at dotnet/runtime#98342 to fix this. We don't have an issue tracking that. This can be the issue.

I've renamed and updated the top comment to just be about managed symbols.