PublishSelfContained should not do a self-contained build

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

  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <PublishSelfContained>true</PublishSelfContained>
  </PropertyGroup>

</Project>

Run dotnet publish.

The output in ./bin/Release/net8.0/linux-x64/publish is self-contained, as expected. What’s unexpected is that the build output in /bin/Release/net8.0/linux-x64 is also self-contained. This is true even if I add <SelfContained>false</SelfContained>.

[ericstj]

Isn’t the whole point of PublishSelfContained to be different from SelfContained? The way I imagine this working is that build is not self-contained. Then during publish the app would get a new runtimeconfig, a copy of the runtime pack, specialization of runtimeTargets for the specific runtime - as well as anything else during build that depends on SelfContained.

[agocke]

I should mention, this would be solved completely by my proposal to make SelfContained only occur during Publish.

If we decide to go that route (and take the breaking change), we would change the behavior of PublishSelfContained as well (arguably we could delete PublishSelfContained entirely, as it is the same thing).

As it is, it feels like the PublishSelfContained design is broken. It doesn’t achieve what we wanted it to achieve (only create a self-contained layout during Publish) and now fixing it would be another breaking change.

The original proposal of obsoleting build-self-contained is looking even more attractive to me now.