paket.reference to recognizing github packages in paket.lock file

Description

The paket.dependencies file is:

source https://www.nuget.org/api/v2

github fsprojects/Argu

Repro steps

1. Create a F# Windows console application using VS 2015/17 Community Edition (OS: Windows 2008 R2)
2. Perform paket init
3. Create paket.dependencies file with the following contents:

source https://www.nuget.org/api/v2

github fsprojects/Argu

1. Create paket.references file in project with contents: Argu
2. Perform paket update (or paket install) from VS menu or commandline

Expected behavior

Argu would now exist as a reference within the project containing the aforementioned paket.reference file.

Actual behavior

The following error message is display (and is not completely represented in VS Error List when install or update is performed from VS’ paket menu):

Paket failed with
-> Installation Errors :
    - <...full path to project...>\paket.references uses NuGet package Argu, but it was not found in the paket.lock file in group Main.

Known workarounds

clone the projects and manually link them into your solutions…ignoring paket.

[gdennie]

@forki I reviewed the documentation again, GitHub dependencies. At the time I somehow thought that paket allowed the import of github hosted libraries similar to how it treated nuget. Upon review, that is not the case. The documentation in this area could use some work.

Thanks for your attention. George.

[shukriadams]

The use case here is that Paket would allow DotNet to be used in the same way that NPM empowered NodeJS - we can create a complex ecosystem of interrelated packages that exist as source code only, and which are built at import time, instead of per package. This is one of NPM’s greatest strengths - it makes code reuse at the package level trivial.