We need a repo convention to ship source generators as part of the ref pack

[ericstj]

I believe we want to ship the Regex source generator by default in .NET 7.0

I checked https://dev.azure.com/dnceng/public/_packaging?_a=package&feed=dotnet7&package=Microsoft.NETCore.App.Ref&protocolType=NuGet&version=7.0.0-alpha.1.21558.2
And noticed that it wasn't present.

I believe because it is not built as part of the normal build that produces the refpack. This is because there is no AnalyzerReference from the src project to the generator project and we have no convention to find and build generator projects as part of src.proj or ref.proj.

We should update the docs to indicate what steps are required (if any additional steps are necessary):
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/331823f4046da1530dd950ac3ad8a87b3cdd584d/docs/coding-guidelines/libraries-packaging.md#netcoreapp-shared-framework

Possible fixes here are:

1. Require some building src project add an AnalyzerReference to the shipping source generator.
2. Add some build convention to src.proj to build the generator.
3. Some other build convention, eg generators.proj.

@stephentoub @joperezr @eerhardt @safern

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Issue Details

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I believe we want to ship the Regex source generator by default in .NET 7.0

I checked https://dev.azure.com/dnceng/public/_packaging?_a=package&feed=dotnet7&package=Microsoft.NETCore.App.Ref&protocolType=NuGet&version=7.0.0-alpha.1.21558.2
And noticed that it wasn't present.

I believe because it is not built as part of the normal build that produces the refpack. This is because there is no AnalyzerReference from the src project to the generator project and we have no convention to find and build generator projects as part of src.proj or ref.proj.

We should update the docs to indicate what steps are required (if any additional steps are necessary):
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/331823f4046da1530dd950ac3ad8a87b3cdd584d/docs/coding-guidelines/libraries-packaging.md#netcoreapp-shared-framework

Possible fixes here are:

1. Require some building src project add an AnalyzerReference to the shipping source generator.
2. Add some build convention to src.proj to build the generator.
3. Some other build convention, eg generators.proj.

@stephentoub @joperezr @eerhardt @safern

Author:	ericstj
Assignees:	-
Labels:	area-Infrastructure-libraries, untriaged
Milestone:	-

[ericstj]

cc @AaronRobinsonMSFT @elinor-fung in case they're also expecting the DllImport generator as well, since it's not currently in the ref pack.

[elinor-fung]

Thanks @ericstj.
Yeah, we will need to do something here as well when we get to productization (added an item to our team's tracking issue).

[joperezr]

Thanks for logging this. I'll follow your first suggestion so that we can get the source generator into the ref pack as soon as possible so we can start getting feedback on it from more people. I'll also log a separate infrastructure issue to talk about conventions, so that we can use that issue to update all of the existing generators once/if a convention is decided upon.

[kasperk81]

net6 comes with two generators, json and logging. not important for ref pack?

[ericstj]

Those are already in the ref-packs (JSON in the NetCore.App ref pack, Logging in ASP.NET). They both also ship packages and reference the source generator as part of their src project, which is why they aren't missing.

This is about a new 7.0 generator for RegEx that was not included in the ref-pack.

[ericstj]

Can this be closed now, @joperezr?

[joperezr]

mm not really, if you see this comment It was decided that this issue would track coming up with a better convention of how to automatically add source generators to the ref pack so that the issue we had in regex wouldn't happen again. I don't think we have done that just yet, we only fixed the individual regex case. We should probably rename this one to match what it is being tracked, or close this and open a new one that tracks specifically the convention work.