Moving package management to a csproj

Barsonax commented 4 years ago

In order to move forward with duality we have to find a way to make dualities way of managing packages compatible with .netnstandard en .netcore.

As it already turned out the nuget upgrade is very painful, so much that I don't really see this upgrade happening anymore.

This issue is to research a completely different approach in which we actually remove the build in package manager from duality. Instead managing packages will be done like any other .NET project, from a csproj.

This has a number of advantages:

Its the standard way to managing packages so developers are already familiar with it
if the csproj is the source of truth then distributing duality could also be done with a dotnet new template based approach (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/how-to-create-your-own-templates-for-dotnet-new/).
Better integration with the .NET build system (self contained applications?)

Some disadvantages:

building a csproj will dump all dlls in the same folder. This means plugins won't end up in a plugin folder. Duality currently cannot handle this without some modifications.
documentation XML files are not copied to the build output folder. I think duality has to be modified to also look for matching documentation files in the global nuget folder. Alternatively we could add a custom target:
```
<Target Name="CopyXMLFromPackages" AfterTargets="Build">
    <Copy SourceFiles="$(PkgPackage_Name)\lib\netcoreapp3.1\{PackageName}.xml" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)" />
</Target>
```
probably some more loose ends.

Most optimal solution would be to stay as close to a default csproj as possible, which means I would lean more towards modifying duality to fit with the default instead of csproj wizardry.

Work has begun on a poc duality template https://github.com/Barsonax/DualityProjectTemplate

ilexp commented 4 years ago

Is there already an issue for updating sample packages to have a link to their source path on GitHub, so people can browse it easily? If not, please create and link to this one.

Barsonax commented 4 years ago

There is now #794, still open for creative ideas.

AdamsLair / duality

Moving package management to a csproj #786