Website to browse platform dependency data

[mthalman]

Summary

A website allows developers to answer their dependency questions themselves in an interactive manner. This can provide a higher level of detail than what might be contained in documentation. This could support scenarios like finding the platform dependencies of a specific NuGet package, finding all components that require a specific package, or finding the specific required package version on a specific distro version.

Note: This is a proposed experience for .NET 6 and not yet committed.

Goals

• Developers can interactively explore .NET's platform dependencies in order to answer their requirement questions.
• Developers have a clear understanding of which platform dependencies are required in order to build .NET from source.
• .NET contributors can easily determine which components of .NET may be affected by a CVE in a platform dependency.

[richlander]

This could support scenarios like finding the native dependencies of a specific NuGet package

Seems like NuGet.org should be that website, for NuGet packages.

Developers can interactively explore .NET's native dependencies in order to answer their requirement questions.

Can you provide some example questions?

[omajid]

Can you provide some example questions?

As I developer, here's an example of something I would love to have answers to:

I want to use LibGit2Sharp. Can I run it on ubuntu.20.04-arm64? If so, what distro (native) packages do I need installed for this to work?

(It turns out that LibGit2Sharp provides native libgit2 libraries for some combination of OS + architecture, and that, in turn, has dependencies on certain OpenSSL versions. Figuring this out is non-trivial. More details here...).