Need good diagnostics for missing dependencies

[danmoseley]

Where ever .NET Core has a requirement on some dependency, we should document it, and far as possible when at runtime it should indicate how to fix the problem.

1. Build time dependencies documented with good errors if not found (focus on CoreFX/CoreCLR repo):

• RHEL/Centos (here)
• Fedora
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Mint
• openSUSE, SLES
• macOS
• Windows (here)

2. Run time dependencies documented with good errors if not found:

• RHEL/Centos
• Fedora
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Mint
• openSUSE, SLES
• macOS
• Windows
• RaspberryPi (here)
• FreeBSD (pending)
• System.Drawing (libgdiplus) Give a meaningful exception message when FunctionWrapper targets are not successfully loaded. corefx#24464
• System.Data.ODBC (unixODBC)

• Some of this information can be mined from our docker files.
• CoreFX build docs for Unix/macOS [here and Windows here
• Out of date information: 1
• Need to check on what the SDK/CLI documents and warns for.

[danmoseley]

cc @Petermarcu

It will take some time to check all these boxes.

[Petermarcu]

I don't think the split is on OS's. I think its on dependency. Linux is the place to focus first because we really don't have any dependencies on Windows and Mac anymore. We should also focus on runtime dependencies first and do the hardening at the callsites to the dependencies to ensure we give a good message.

The checklist should look more like what is in this list I think:

https://github.com/dotnet/docs/blob/master/docs/core/linux-prerequisites.md#linux-distribution-dependencies

[weshaggard]

@danmosemsft is this something you are still targeting for 2.1?

[danmoseley]

No

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