Should the dotnet/sdk image include libxml2 in order to support dotnet-coverage?

[mthalman]

Discussed in #4183

^{Originally posted by @RobinsonWM November 2, 2022}
In the dotnet/sdk image, if I run dotnet tool install dotnet-coverage and then run unit tests with code coverage, the result is an empty coverage report, and this message is logged to the console:

No code coverage data available. Profiler was not initialized. Verify that glibc (>=2.27), libxml2 and all .NET dependecies are installed.

The code coverage tool requires libxml2, as documented on this GitHub issue: microsoft/vstest#981 (comment)

Since code coverage should be a common thing to do when using the dotnet/sdk image, should we consider including libxml2? In my particular case, my CI builds run in a Docker container but not as root, so I have to jump through hoops to install libxml2.

Also see microsoft/vstest#3400

[mthalman]

[Triage]
We want to avoid including unnecessary bloat to the .NET container images. The SDK image is intended to be a bundling of the .NET SDK. Since the dotnet-coverage tool is outside of the SDK installation, it has its own dependencies that need to be managed separately. We want to avoid including all possible native dependencies that can exist for the set of .NET tools that are available. This would be something we might consider if there was very high demand, but dotnet-coverage doesn't meet that bar.