cloudfoundry / cloudfoundry/dotnet-core-buildpack

Building from source uses highly flawed method of detecting versions

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#520 10 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Go
Stars
97
Forks
91
Avg merge
1h
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

Current buildpack tries to parse .csproj file as XML to extract TargetFramework and a few other properties to determine the correct version to introduce. This is a highly flawed way of doing it because .csproj is essentially an MSBuild script. There can be a very large number of ways to set these properties in a way that is non standard for all sorts of legit reasons. The value of <TargetFramework> may actually be a variable that comes from a common import file at parent level. It may be set by Directory.Build.props which is a common way to set it for multiple projects simultaneously as it's automatically imported from a parent folder. It may be absent altogether and declared as signifying that the project can run on multiple runtimes. The only thing that can accurately answer which TargetFramework is actually being used is MSBuild itself.

The simplest way to query MSBuild for this info is to inject a target that echos the property to console and parse it. For example if you append this to the bottom of csproj

  <Target Name="__GetFrameworkVersion">
    <Message Text="TargetFramework is '$(TargetFramework)'" Importance="High" />
  </Target>

one can print out the value of TargetFramework to console by running

> dotnet msbuild /t:__GetFrameworkVersion

Microsoft (R) Build Engine version 17.0.0+c9eb9dd64 for .NET
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

  TargetFramework is 'net6.0'

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the buildpack code that parses .csproj files for TargetFramework, then review the MSBuild behavior described in issue #520. Run dotnet msbuild /t:__GetFrameworkVersion against representative projects and verify that the implementation uses MSBuild output instead of XML parsing, including projects using imports or TargetFrameworks.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp, go
Domain
build-system
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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