Is prefercliruntime the preferred solution for CLI tools?

Related: https://github.com/fable-compiler/Fable/issues/961#event-1099667439

Hi there! Recently a user has reported a problem with dotnet-fable CLI tool as apparently the tool won’t run if the user has a lower dotnet SDK (and thus coreclr runtime) patch version than the one used to build it. This behavior doesn’t look very intuitive as netcoreapp target frameworks don’t include a patch version (netcoreapp1.0, netcoreapp1.1), and one would expect the tool to work with all coreclr 1.0.x runtimes, or at least to be able to set the minimum patch version explicitly instead of letting MSBuild do it for you.

However, @enricosada has explained to me the tradeoffs for CLI tools and suggested to use a prefercliruntime file to avoid the error. The question then is: is this the preferred solution for all CLI tools? If so, could it be documented somewhere, added to CLI tools templates, improve the error message users see when it’s missing, etc?

Thanks a lot for your help!

[enricosada]

runtime 1.1.0? I thought CLI tools couldn’t target necoreapp1.1

i think when running it on os with just 1.1, will just pass --fx-version 1.1 argument of dotnet exec to override what runtime use.

@dsplaisted told me the name of the MSBuild property to set the runtime version but I forgot it and couldn’t find it in the documentation. Which one is it and how is it used?

@alfonsogarciacaro grepping dotnet msbuild /pp > logpp.txt

  <ItemGroup Condition=" '$(DisableImplicitFrameworkReferences)' != 'true' and '$(TargetFrameworkIdentifier)' == '.NETStandard'" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <PackageReference Include="NETStandard.Library" Version="$(NetStandardImplicitPackageVersion)" IsImplicitlyDefined="true" />
  </ItemGroup>
  <ItemGroup Condition=" '$(DisableImplicitFrameworkReferences)' != 'true' and '$(TargetFrameworkIdentifier)' == '.NETCoreApp'" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.NETCore.App" Version="$(RuntimeFrameworkVersion)" IsImplicitlyDefined="true" />
  </ItemGroup>

so $(RuntimeFrameworkVersion) for Microsoft.NETCore.App, and $(NetStandardImplicitPackageVersion) for netstandard.library packages

[livarcocc]

Closing this issue since the questions here seem to have been clarified a while ago.