Consider adding developmentDependency to nuspec for Cake.Common

[daveaglick]

This flag was introduced in 2.8 for .nuspec files and indicates that the package is intended to support things like addons where you don't want to consuming package to take a dependency in it's own package. This seems appropriate for Cake.Common since it's primarily consumed by addins, which shouldn't actually take a NuGet dependency since that library will already be loaded by the engine and may cause conflicts if the addin takes a dependency and downloads a different version. The effect of this flag in the .nuspec is that NuGet will automatically add the developmentDependency flag to the packages.config of the consuming library.

[devlead]

Cool, sounds like a good idea to me 👍

[daveaglick]

Great, I'll spin up a PR

[daveaglick]

It turns out NuGetPackSettings doesn't have support for this flag either. I'll submit a separate PR to add it to the packing alias.

[patriksvensson]

@daveaglick The dependencies for Cake.Common are specified in the nuspec directly and not via code.

[daveaglick]

@patriksvensson Great - that'll make it super easy to add the flag for Cake.Common (in fact, incoming now...).

Should probably still add to NuGetPackSettings so that Cake users can take advantage of it when packing without a .nuspec from Cake.

[patriksvensson]

@daveaglick Absolutely! Great initiative!

[gitfool]

@daveaglick When doing this you should also specify minClientVersion="2.8":

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package>
  <metadata minClientVersion="2.8">
    <developmentDependency>true</developmentDependency>
  </metadata>
</package>

[daveaglick]

@gitfool Hmm - good point. That might be a problem though. Do we necessarily want to limit addin developers to having a NuGet client >= 2.8? Maybe that's reasonable, I'm not sure.

What would happen if an earlier version client found this unsupported element as a child of metadata? Does NuGet ignore elements it doesn't recognize or does it throw an error?

[gitfool]

@daveaglick I can't answer those questions, sorry; not without testing it out for myself that is.

If requiring NuGet client 2.8 is acceptable, then you can simply add the attribute. FWIW, 2.8 came out in January 2014 (http://docs.nuget.org/release-notes/nuget-2.8).

@devlead @patriksvensson @gep13 thoughts?

[devlead]

@daveaglick @gitfool I'm ok with 2.8 requirement, the older versions aren't even downloadable anymore on nuget.org

@patriksvensson @gep13 do you agree?

[daveaglick]

@gitfool Just submitted another PR to add it. I was going to go ahead and test the behavior of pre-2.8 clients, but as @devlead point out, you can't even download them anymore. Figured that was as good a signal as any that it was okay to exclude them. Especially since using Cake.Common via NuGet would typically be done by addin authors who presumably are using updated tools.

[gitfool]

👍