<Private>True</Private> is Visual Studio-specific

When making a change with Paket, it automatically adds the <Private>True</Private> element to each dependency reference in the xxproj files.

I would rather it did not. After making a change to a project file in Xamarin Studio, this is the result:

It means that all project files receive a lot of churn, and it’s an annoyance to manually fiddle with a project in XS before committing every time paket has been used.

If it’s the opposite case for Visual Studio, and it requires the Private-element-flag, or otherwise adds it itself, then perhaps a nice heuristic would be to check whether paket is running on mono, and then not add the flag?

[forki]

Strange. In referenced docs we find:

Private - Optional string. Determines whether to copy the file to the output directory. Values are:
  - Never
  - Always
  - PreserveNewest

According to this true is not even a valid value.

[BrainSlugs83]

@forki on the linked page, for the “Reference” element’s “Private” attribute it says:

Optional boolean. Specifies whether the reference should be copied to the output folder. This attribute matches the Copy Local property of the reference that’s in the Visual Studio IDE.

The only place where “Always”, “Never” and “PreserveNewest” are mentioned is on the “CopyToOutputDirectory” attribute.

Further, I can confirm that “True” and “False” are what Visual Studio 2015 places in that value. According to the MSDN documentation, “True” and “False” are the only valid values.