Improve workloads versioning

[marcpopMSFT]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

There is no way to specify a specific version of the SDK for workloads. Rollback files but you have to know individual workload manifest versions. We've discussed having the concept of grouped versioning where say 6.0.100 has a set of manifest versions that match that so a customer could say they wanted to install 6.0.100 or 6.0.101 versions of those manifests/packs (think of a workloads version of releases.json).

Describe the solution you'd like

TBD

Additional context

This could be really confusing. Would this go into a global.json or as a command line argument?

[marcpopMSFT]

@mhutch I believe you had mentioned some ideas in this space previously as well. We'll be assigning this to a PM soon to gather more requirements.

[marcpopMSFT]

CC @baronfel since I can't assign this yet. We can chat about it when you're ready.

[sandyarmstrong]

Thanks for filing, I also found this very confusing. It has not been clear to me how to pick a specific workload version, or how to know ahead of time what version will be used. This information is not available in the dotnet workload commands.

When using workloads, the most obvious approach that seems useful to me would be to pin versions in global.json, just like with any other dotnet/msbuild SDK.

[cwensley]

This is causing major issues for us, especially for the macos workload. We figured that the specific version of a workload would be pinned to the version of the SDK, but that is not the case.

Is there a way to install a specific version of a workload via command line or other? At the very least that would get our developers back on track and we can update the workload for our builds after we have done sufficient testing.

This is a major problem for us, and waiting until 6.0.3xx is not really an option here.

[sandyarmstrong]

Is there a way to install a specific version of a workload via command line or other?

@cwensley yeah, here's the approach I've been taking:

1. Create a rollback.json file that looks something like {"microsoft.net.sdk.macos":"12.0.101-preview.10.251"}.
2. Ensure you have sdk.version set properly in global.json.
3. Run sudo dotnet workload install macos --from-rollback-file rollback.json --ignore-failed-sources --source https://aka.ms/dotnet6/nuget/index.json --source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json

You'll probably have to redo this if you install any security updates. I know I had to after using 6.0.100 and then installing 6.0.101.

If you also need to check what workload version is installed, I suggest reading the entirety of #22882.

[cwensley]

Hey @sandyarmstrong, thank you for the very quick response! I'll try it out.

Is there any documentation about rollback.json? I can't find anything and it isn't shown in dotnet workload install --help

[sandyarmstrong]

Is there any documentation about rollback.json? I can't find anything and it isn't shown in dotnet workload install --help

They recently added https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/main/documentation/general/workload-rollback.md. I still think it would be nice if even advanced options like these were in the inline help.