Losing version-range when 'dotnet pack'

Description

Yet again, it might not be paket’s problem, but maybe there is something you can do about it.

Guys from ‘NLog’ team made a mess and rolled back version making making 4.5 newer than 5.0.

My library, let’s call it libA requires version 4.5 so paket.dependencies contains:

nuget NLog ~> 4 beta

and it is getting 4.5. So far, so good.

Now, my other project, let’s call it appB, which uses libA does not know or care about NLog. The only dependency it has is libA:

nuget libA

But… when I do paket install it resolves NLog version 5.0.

Apparently, dotnet pack for libA puts the restriction >= 4.5 instead of >= 4.5 && < 5.

Long story short, my very precise restrictions about versions are lost when crossing dotnet pack boundary.

Repro steps

nlfu.zip

Run setup.cmd. Notice NLog 4 is referenced in libA (correctly) but appB references NLog 5 (wrongly).

Expected behavior

Both libA and appB reference version 4 of NLog.

Actual behavior

Restrictions are “forgotten”, and appB references “newest” version of “NLog”

Known workarounds

Explicitly put restrictions in appB again (even if assembly is not used directly).

[MiloszKrajewski]

@baronfel I will start working on it now (I need to extract the “essence of the problem” from quite large commercial codebase).

[MiloszKrajewski]

I think the problem was a little bit different: I am stupid. I didn’t pay attention to Could not find version range for package Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection because… it wasn’t in red (or yellow). Definitely saying why (“because it is not in paket.dependencies”) would help, but really… color was primary reason.

I behaved like an idiot and I feel really ashamed about that.

(I would still expect this to be warning during build - not only pack, but that’s minor)