Using PrivateAssets="all" on a package reference seems remove the assemblies from the final output

[jonathanpeppers]

Describe the bug

Moving from: dotnet/android#6674

Respond to @jeromelaban

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Building with a package reference marked with "PrivateAssets="all"" removes the assemblies from the apk.

It's not a blocking issue, as the PrivateAssets metadata is not useful in the context of a app's head project, but it can be a failure hard to troubleshoot.

To Reproduce

Create a net6-android app, add a nuget package reference with PrivateAssets="all" and use types from the package's assemblies.

At runtime, the assemblies from the package will fail to load.

Further technical details

Similar behavior in a console app:

dotnet new console
dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json
# manually add PrivateAssets="all"
dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained
ls bin\Release\net7.0\win-x64\publish\Newtonsoft.*

Thus we are not sure if this is "by design" or not.

[marcpopMSFT]

@nkolev92?

[nkolev92]

That's something that the SDK does specially for publish. To my knowledge, PrivateAssets=all is basically being implemented as Private="true", which isn't ideal.

From a NuGet perspective, I don't think any big side-effects if the SDK were to change that, and personally I think that should be done, but unfortunately it'd be a great change.

I don't understand the publish scenario well enough to recommend that it should be done.

Some related issues;

#1019 (comment)
#952