Publish: PrivateAssets=All not honored on ProjectReference items

[bricelam]

Steps

1. Create a new .NET Core Console App
2. Add a new .NET Standard Class Library
3. Reference the class library from the console app:

   <ProjectReference Include="..\ClassLibrary1\ClassLibrary1.csproj"
                     PrivateAssets="All" />

4. Run dotnet publish on the console app.

Unexpected Results

• ClassLibrary1.dll is copied to the the 'publish' directory.

[dasMulli]

It does work with ReferenceOutputAssembly="false" as metadata.

[livarcocc]

@bricelam Did you mean ProjectReference in the title?

@nguerrera @dsplaisted Is there a reason for having a separate metadata to convey what seems like the same intention between packagereference and projectreference?

[bricelam]

Doh, yes.

[bricelam]

Also, IncludeAssets, ExcludeAssets & PrivateAssets are documented as supported by NuGet on ProjectReference items.

[bricelam]

ReferenceOutputAssembly has slightly different semantics too. PrivateAssets would still let you compile against it.

[nguerrera]

They are supported in so far as they alter the assets json produced by restore. In this case though that isn't sufficient to impact the copy local semantics of project refs. In other words, we're missing some extra code to handle that part in that case.

I remain confused by the fact that PrivateAssets=All has special meaning to also imply not publishing. This seems orthogonal to 'consume but do not flow'. I wonder if publish filtering on package and project refs should use something else.

[nguerrera]

Using Private=false metadata instead of ReferenceOutputAssembly=false should work for the compile against but do not copy semantic. (This is another data point that the term private is a poor choice for impacting copying. Classic reference metadata and nuget metadata are overloading it with opposite meaning. :()