VS's Package Management Console is broken

[M0ns1gn0r]

Description

The changes introduced in commit 833b36c broke the Package Management Console in Visual Studio.

An error occurred while reading file 'D:\Work\PaketVersionTest\packages.config': Invalid package version for package id 'EntityFramework': '[6.2.0]'

The brackets syntax seems to be not supported by NuGet.

Repro steps

1. Create paket.dependencies with the following content:

framework: net472
redirects: on

source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json

nuget EntityFramework ~> 6.2 version_in_path: true

2. Create a classic .csproj and put EntityFramework to its paket.references.

3. Execute paket install.

Expected behavior

1. The created packages.config contains:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
  <package id="EntityFramework" version="6.2.0" />
</packages>

2. The Package Management Console window can be opened, no errors are shown.

Actual behavior

1. The created packages.config contains:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
  <package id="EntityFramework" version="[6.2.0]" />
</packages>

2. An error is displayed after opening the Package Management Console window.

[forki]

But the packages.config is correct. Isn't it?

[matthid]

I don’t think packages.config allows version ranges. packages.config always locks a particular version. I guess we have mixed parsing/serializing logic between multiple formats here?

[enricosada]

i can repro too at work.
after a paket install, the version is broken because [x.y.x] is not supported by vs.
i'll fix that

[0x53A]

This also breaks unit test integration (e.g. xunit.runner.visualstudio)

[ben-reilly]

Do you folks have any updates on this? As far as I can tell and can verify locally, we just need to remove the square brackets from the version string in packages.config.

[forki]

Yes, we would accept a fix. I can't do it myself right now, since I'm on longer vacation. ben-reilly <notifications@github.com> schrieb am Do., 14. Juni 2018, 01:07:

…

Do you folks have any updates on this? As far as I can tell and can verify locally, we just need to remove the square brackets from the version string in packages.config. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3231 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADgNFNdzNR7tcZmUcwArj44-MB2IP0Pks5t8ZsTgaJpZM4UT0U6> .

[inosik]

See #3253.

[ben-reilly]

@inosik That looks right to me. Thanks for putting it together.

For others, here's the reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/package-versioning

It appears that although it's possible to specify ranges in project and .nuspec files, and even in the "allowedVersions" attribute in packages.config, only exact versions are permitted in the "version" attribute in packages.config. So being able to read ranges is fine for those other files, but we should only be writing exact versions to packages.config.