Android Transient Dependancies

[ne0rrmatrix]

Currently we have two projects importing AndroidX support libraries nugets from Xamarin team. The version of those nugets has transient dependancies so that the version number is only compatible with a specific range of other packages with everything interdependant.

If we keep using the same nuget version we will end up packages that will start provided build warnings and then it eventually fail to compile. MS and the Maui team are in constant development and unfortunately for us that means the compatibility of our package needs to at least be close in build version to depedancies that dotnet android that is used in maui is.

If they get to far out of sync our camera and media element will not work at all. At the moment some issues can be mitigated by adjusting the transient dependancies manually in our csproj files. We have been doing that and I plan another PR today to solve some build issues with camera. This is not actually changing the camera packages themselves. Just adjusting the transient dependancies so that build warnings are fixed.

We need a long term plan to actively choose to adjust and keep our packages updated to match the various dependancies regardless of any new features in Android support libraries. If we choose not to we will have our libraries that we use for camera and media element start to have compatibility issues with Maui after a while.

[dotMorten]

I hit this issue really hard too. While I could just disable the warnings in my class project, the warnings are viral, so the nuget package that generates will introduce that warning to everyone referencing the package as well. It was really ugly to "fix" by explicitly referencing a bunch of packages in the project, rather than the usual way of letting transitive packages figure it out,