Allow Dependencies Listed in a Nuspec file to have a Parameters Attribute.

[pyrostew]

I have noticed while working on a project where we build customised Windows OS images that there isn't a neat way of passing parameters to package dependencies.

Essentially we have a series of software packages that have been built by internal software teams. Each of these packages can have dependencies on other internal packages or 3rd party packages. Some of these dependant packages need parameters passing to them to install correctly, but there is no apparent mechanism to do that from the parent package nuspec.

At the moment we avoid this by pulling the packages that need parameters up to the top level and add the parameters to the calling code. This isn't ideal as it contaminates the top level build process with information that it shouldn't care about, and should be managed by other teams.

Being able to do something like this in the Dependencies element would be ideal, but I'm not sure what the knock on effects would be from doing this.

<dependencies>
   <dependency id="Internal01" />
   <dependency id="internal02" params="--arch x64" />
   <dependency id="internal03" />
   <dependency id="external01" params="--LogDirectory C:\Logs" />
   <dependency id="external02" />
</dependencies>

[gep13]

@corbob what impact, if any, would this have on Intune support for package installation? Would it be able to take this information, and pass it through to the installation performed there?

[corbob]

🤔 I don't believe we would be able to handle it currently. But I also question how install/upgrade would handle it should the dependency already exist. Is this expected to be a "use these parameters if this dependency isn't already installed" situation, or a "make sure these parameters were used, and reinstall with these parameters if you don't know" scenario?

From the Intune side, once those scenarios are sorted out on the install/upgrade, we could likely build something in, although off the top of my head I'm not sure how difficult that would be, probably extending the data we put in the notes field and somehow building that into the install command or something like that.

[pauby]

I feel that the parameters would only affect an install / upgrade of the dependency package. I think this would be the cleanest and simplest way to do it. @gep13?